218 A Century of Science 



for fortitude and high resolve, for sagacious leader- 

 ship, statesmanlike wisdom, unswerving integrity, 

 devoted loyalty, for all the qualities which make 

 life heroic, we may learn lessons innumerable from 

 the noble Frenchmen who throng in Parkman's 

 pages. The difficulty was not in the individuals, 

 but in the system ; not in the units, but in the 

 way they were put together. For while it is true 

 though many people do not know it that by 

 no imaginable artifice can you make a society that 

 is better than the human units you put into it, it 

 is also true that nothing is easier than to make a 

 society that is worse than its units. So it was with 

 the colony of New France. 



Nowhere can we find a description of despotic 

 government more careful and thoughtful, or more 

 graphic and lifelike, than Parkman has given us 

 in his volume on " The Old Regime in Canada." 

 Seldom, too, will one find a book fuller of political 

 wisdom. The author never preaches like Carlyle, 

 nor does he hurl huge generalizations at our heads 

 like Buckle ; he simply describes a state of society 

 that has been. But I hardly need say that his 

 description is not like the Dryasdust descriptions 

 we are sometimes asked to accept as history a 

 mere mass of pigments flung at random upon a 

 canvas. It is a picture painted with consummate 



