134 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



The French foundations in the Northwest proved failures. 

 When French officers gazed at the charge of the six hundred at 

 Balaklava, they cried out: "This is admirable, but it is not 

 war." So French foundations in the Northwest were wonderful 

 beyond all wonder, but they did not constitute a state, one whole 

 body fitly framed together, which vital in every part cannot but 

 by annihilating, die. 



The first foundation was Fun. Fun taken in homeopathic 

 doses is good, but it is by no means substantial food for a life- time 

 much less for a nation's life. At all events it either finds or makes 

 frivolous those to whom it is all inall, — labor and not merely lux- 

 ury, — business as well as lecreation. If all the year were playing 

 holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work. Savage life, how- 

 ever fascinating at a distance as to the novelist Cooper, or the sen- 

 timentalist Rousseau, loses romance when viewed- close at hand 

 as by Parkman domiciliated among Dakotahs — indeed by the 

 sober second thought of any one capable of appreciating civiliza- 

 tion and aspiring to progress. 



The result was that French fun-lovers, either like Nicolet re- 

 turned from their sportive sallies to dwell among their own peo- 

 ple as well as educative and elevating institutions, or on the other 

 hand, they sunk to the low level of the aborigines around them, 

 perhaps degraded them still lower by the vices of civilization. 

 The backwoods maxim proved true; that it is the hardest 

 thing in the world to make a white man out of an Indian, while 

 it is very easy to make an Indian out of a white man. 



The apostles of faith also failed in the far west. Their want of 

 success was due in part to the extermination by war and plague 

 of tribes among whom they ministered, in part to inability to re- 

 claim other tribes from nomadic habits, and in part to the nature 

 of their teachings. Their exhibition of Christianity was rather 

 spectacular than intellectual, more emotional than practical. 

 Among their maxims I frnd these: "It is God's will that who- 

 ever is born a subject should not reason but obey." " Teaching 

 girls to read is robbing them of time." They taught singing but 

 not reading. No newspaper appeared in New France till after 

 the British conquest. At an Indian college which had flourished 



