First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 135 



•for a generation Frontenac, relates that no student could speak 

 Freoch. In spite of all pains pupils proved Calibans on whom 

 nurture would never stick. Of one that was taken to France at 

 a tender age, baptized, and learned French well, I read that when 

 brought back to Canada as an interpreter, he became as rude a 

 barbarian as any one and held fast his barbarism to the end. 



If the Jesuits had had free course on our Upper Lakes, the result 

 would have been nations submissive but not self-sufficing, peace- 

 able but unable to defend themselves — having the personnel of 

 men but the puerility of children. They had an ordinance to 

 hasten the physical weaning of Indian children — but their 

 mental weaning they would never permit. 



Frontenac's report to the home government was : " The Jesuits 

 will not civilize the Indians because they wish to keep them in 

 perpetual wardship. Their missions are hence mockeries." They 

 censured La Salle because at his fort he had some fifty Indian, 

 children taught to read and write. 



Compared with the sturdy Puritan, the self-reliant Yankee, the 

 products of Jesuit training would seem those legendary monkeys 

 who were intended to be men, but whose creation being begun on 

 Saturday afternoon, was interrupted by the coming on of the Sab- 

 bath, so that they were sent into this breathing world scarce half 

 made up. Their development remains arrested still. Well is it 

 said: "A man to be a man must feel that he holds his fate in his 

 own hands." 



However Jesuits might have succeeded, in blowing up a bub- 

 ble, bright and polished as glass and iridescent with rainbow hues, 

 it must have burst at the first rude shock from without, as did the 

 insubstantial pageant which they conjured up in Paraguay. 



A heretic would say that their system had not truth enough ia 

 it to make a lasting lie. Hence it was, " The perlurne and sup- 

 pliance of a minute." 



The far-trader rejoiced in a longer success than either the votary 

 of fun or the apostle of faith. But his occupation too was gone 

 at length. Fur-bearing animals vanished even sooner than the 

 forests that sheltered them. 



Fish began to be taken in Canadian, waters before the first furs 



