138 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



ones plied with new skill, would have betaken themselves to 

 Canada. There no strange language nor strange institutions re- 

 pelled them. Thej never willingly expatriated themselves, and in 

 New France they would have seemed still at home. It has not 

 been enough noticed that New France was at first founded by 

 French Protestants, and that the early adventurers thither were of 

 the same faith, as well as that outfitters being Calvinists would 

 not admit Jesuits into their ships. Next, the two religions for a 

 time there held divided empire. When a priesi, and a minister 

 there died on the same day, they were laid in the same grave. 

 "Let us see," it was said, " whether they who have always lived 

 at war will now lie in peace." The first petition of Jesuits that 

 "reformed religionists," so-called, should be forbidden to inhabit 

 Canada dates from 1621. Rejected at that time by the French 

 king it was granted six years afterwards. 



Had such been the French foundations in our Northwest, they 

 might still have stood strong there. The Canadians, while scarcely 

 a tithe of the English, held their own for a century. What if 

 they had surpassed them in numbers, as much as they did in 

 unity, military spirit, and friendship for the aborigines? 



In all likelihood France and England would to-day hold di- 

 vided empire throughout the territory embraced by the United 

 States. The settlers, — each race afraid of the other, — would 

 both have clung to their mother countries, and sought protection 

 under their wingtu During the Napoleonic wars, instead of being 

 developed by the carryiog-trade of Europe, — by a market there 

 for all our products, and by dedication to the arts of peace, we 

 colonists should, have beeu all the while belligerents, — and that 

 between two fires, pierced by invasions from the west, while our 

 coast was ravaged and our ports bombarded. 



Not a few in this audience are of Huguenot descent. Their 

 ancestors in all colonial wars must have fought against those 

 British provinces for which in fact they fought. 



Even if the colonies, — English and French, — had one or both 

 of them become independent, each race would have forcced the 

 other to maintain a standing army of European proportions, to 

 build a Chinese wall, or line of forts — "the labor of an age ia 



