First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 189 



■piled stones," — from the Upper Lakes to the Gulf. Border col- 

 lisions would daily occur. Wars must have been frequent and 

 chronic. 



Again, had the French centuries ago burst into the Northwest 

 by thousands instead of bj^ scores, they would have planted their 

 medifeval institutions too deeply to be rooted out. Lords of broad 

 domains would have monopolized the land. Under them would 

 have been vassals uneducated save to drudgery or death-dealing, 

 not one in a thousand of them rising above the low level of that 

 inglorious throng in which they were born. The Texan question 

 of a witness, " Do you write your name like a monk, or make 

 your mark like a gentleman?"' would have been common all the 

 way from the tropic to the pole. 



The masses would have remained clannish retainers of heredi- 

 tary chiefs. Bach seigniory would have been a section cut out 

 of France with all the pre-revolutionary enormities carried over 

 ocean and continent like the angel-borne holy house of Loretto, 

 and set down in the Mississippi Valley with all its imperfections 

 on its head. 



Even that earthquake revolution which toppled to the earth 

 the feudal fabrics of France, would not have extended into the 

 heart of thi^ continent. It was, in fact, powerless even on the 

 lower St. Lawrence, so far as not reinforced by British thunder. 



On the whole, had Huguenots been tolerated from the first in 

 New France, a million of them would have migrated there, and 

 its population would have been no less numerous or puissant than 

 that of British America. All the European colonies in America 

 would probably still be subject to their parent states. 



At all events they would have so balanced each other, and 

 their mutual relations would have been so antagonistic, that the 

 rise, progress and world-wide influence of those institutions and 

 that form of society which are distinctively American, would 

 have been impossible. America would have been Europeanized. 

 There is no room in the universe for both Christ and Belial. So 

 there was no room in these United States for both freedom and 

 feudalism. 



Well then may we thank God for the intolerance of Louis 



