228 • THE COLONIAL EXPANSION OF FRANCE 



he would give all his colonies for a pin's head. Choiseul was glad 

 to give Canada to England, because American colonies, delivered 

 from the presence of the French, would revolt against tlieir mother 

 country. France is not now grateful to him for his practical joke, 

 though it was against England. Voltaire refers to the whole Ohio 

 basin as "' a few acres of snow." Among other things, he expresses 

 the very charitable wish " to see Canada at the bottom of the sea." 

 The wise Montesquieu is not wiser. " Kings," he says, " should not 

 dream of populating great countries by colonies. . . . The ordi- 

 nary effect of colonies is to weaken the country whence they are 

 drawn without i)0])u]ating those to which they are sent." Econo- 

 mists insisted that the process was ruinous. Philosophers and philan- 

 thropists objected to colonies because of .the presence of slaves in 

 most of them. So indifferent was the French government that, 

 before signing an alliance with tlie American colonists, it made a 

 formal renunciation of its North American possessions, and in the 

 sweeping arraignments of the Ancien Regime not one refers to the 

 loss of a vast colonial empire. 



To this blind indifference to transatlantic colonies there were some 

 excej)tions. Many Frenchmen realized the importance of the New- 

 foundland fisheries, and France clung tenaciously to them. Notwith- 

 standing the clearness of French rights. Englishmen did their utmost, 

 on the morrow of the Treat}' of Paris, to deprive Frenchmen of their 

 privileges. This intensified in the French heart the bitterness felt 

 against an enemy which, hoAvever admirable in some respects, had 

 never displayed any generosit}' in victory and seldom any fidelity to 

 its treaties. The hypothetical explanation b}' Professor Seele}' of the 

 wars between England and France during 100 3'ears as acomj)etition 

 for the new world is one of those fascinating generalizations of histo- 

 rians which, on the French side at least, has but a slender sui)port. 

 Frenchmen, in all the wars of the Revolution and of the Empire, seldom 

 thought that they were contending for a vast empire. In their eyes 

 it did not appear worth the })Owder l)urr.ed. How could the Revolu- 

 tionists, busy at home with a program of reforms never attempted 

 at one time l)y an}' nation, contending against local uprisings and 

 against united P^urope, think of the colonies that they had lost? Al- 

 though they defended the colonies that were left to them, the solution 

 of the problem of freedom upon the continent reacted in some colonies. 

 When the Revolutionists decreed the abolition of slavery the San 

 Domingo Royalists signed a treaty with England that they might keep 



