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But mere disparity of numbers was almost | native tribes. The policy which Chamcounterbalanced by the advantages which plain began for purposes of exploration, New France possessed. She had at her missionaries continued in the interests of disposal hordes of savage allies skilled in Christianity, and fur-traders perpetuated backwoods warfare. She occupied a posj- for the sake of commerce. Forty years of tion of immense natural strength. Her missionary enterprise were wasted, so far enemies were a string of discordant as the growth of Canada was concerned, communities, hampered by refractory as in the unsuccessful labor of christianizing semblies, divided by internal dissensions, the Red Indians. On this movement and differing so widely in character and dispo- period were concentrated the energy and sition that they displayed more points of enthusiasm of the colony. Before expeantagonism than of resemblance. Canada, [rience proved the hopelessness of the united and centralized, could move her task, the opportunity of crushing the Iroforces with that vigor, decision, and celer-quois had passed away. Possessed of the ity which despotism alone commands. arms of civilized soldiers, the Five NaHad the Canadians received the same tions overpowered the Canadians. It is training as the New England colonists, difficult to exaggerate the disastrous effect they would not have succumbed to the on the colony of their inveterate hostility. forces by which they were opposed. It is With the second period was created the to the religious and political system es religious monopoly. Before 1628 Canada tablished in Canada that the French in- was open to both Catholics and Hugueferiority in numbers as well as their ulti- nots; subsequently she was a "citadel of Roman Catholic orthodoxy." In the Britmate defeat must be attributed. ish colonies, taken together, every phase of religious thought was represented. Canada adopted the rule of exclusion; her rivals built on the principle of compre hension. Thus France resolutely rejected religion, the strongest and most enduring of all agents of colonization. Nor was this all. Intellectual dependence characterizes priest-ridden countries. Popular education, discouraged in Canada, was widely diffused in New England; while Canada possessed no printing-press, New England boasted a respectable native literature.

New France was founded under the patronage of a court, New England with out its favor; the one was colonized by a government, the other by a people; the former by single men and single women, the latter by families. English colonists were driven to emigrate by poverty or persecution; their settlement was, in its origin, a protest for religious and political liberty. No such causes peopled Canada. The Canadians were neither religious refugees nor the overflow of the older community; the bulk of them were landed Religious despotism checked in New France by the arbitrary will of Louis XIV. Such colonists mustered few population, repressed moral courage, ener settlers of the same stamp as those who vated mental robustness. The third pefaced exile sooner than be poor or perse-riod brought with it, or exaggerated, cuted at home. But this early taint of disease might have yielded to the rough treatment of colonial life. The French a precasettlers under Champlain won rious foothold on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Like the New England colonists, the early Canadians maintained an incessant struggle for existence; like them they underwent a training eminently calculated to develope self-reliance and independence. But at every step in their subsequent history, Canada and New England diverge more widely apart. Each of the three periods that have been marked in Canadian history contributed its ele ments of weakness. Champlain left as a legacy to his successors the alliance with the Hurons and the hostility of the Iroquois. It is a distinctive feature of the French occupation of Canada that they endeavored not to exterminate, enslave, or even displace, but to amalgamate with the

monopolies of trade and government. Both France and England regarded their American settlements as farms, regulated colonial trade in their own interests, monopolized their consumption, and carried their produce. But while the British colonists developed their own industries, nothing in Canada was left to private enterprise. Nor did Canada devote herself to agriculture, the nursing mother of na tions. Perseverance is pre-eminently the quality of the French peasant; but off his own soil, he displays no capacity for continuous exertion. Minute and vexatious regulations imposed by the Canadian government increased his repugnance to agri. culture.

Traffic in the natural productions of the country, not the cultivation of the soil, was from first to last the absorbing interest of the colonists. Adventure, freedom, high profits, combined to render the fur trade intensely attractive. But

But presently, after the play has gone on for a little while (on the stage of life it is not the play that ends, but the actors who come and go), we begin to see that, although some of us may be suited to our parts, there are others whose natures are ill fitted to their rôle, and very often we find the performers suddenly playing away in their own natural characters instead of those which they are supposed to represent, to the very great confusion of the drama which is going on.

Here is the lawyer making love to his client instead of drawing up her will; the parson fighting his bishop instead of guarding his flock; the soldier preaching sermons; the actor taking his part in serious earnest, and blessing his people with unction. A hundred instances come to one's mind of fiddlers and tailors set to rule great kingdoms, with what tragic ill luck, alas, we all remember. Was not one mechanician born to a throne, whose life paid for his idiosyncrasies? And, again, have we not heard of a Spinoza patiently at work upon his lenses earning his daily pittance, a true king among men, whose wise and noble thoughts still rule the minds of succeeding genera tions? Other instances will occur to us

this fatal trade, which checked the growth a heroine, a lawgiver, a widow, and so of population, diverted the settlers from forth. fixed pursuits, and drained the life-blood of the colony, received from the government itself its most powerful incentive. France transplanted from the Old World her institutions, her Catholic Church, her feudal society, and bureaucratic central ization. She imposed them with a strong hand on Canada from without. Self-government was rigorously suppressed. The colonists, excluded from public life, had only private interests; in the fur trade they found their one field of energy; the sole education afforded by the political system was not in independence, but in insubordination; liberty was unknown except as license. New England, on the contrary, was created by, and in turn created, self-reliant, self-dependent men; centralization was not only alien, but unknown; her constitutions were native products, growing with the growth of the people; her popular institutions offered ample field for the development of public life and energy. Patronage was the portion of Canada, neglect the more fortunate lot of New England; the one remained a timid dependency, the other became a sturdy colony, jealous of her independence; the one proved a skilfully arranged failure, the other a blundering success. Inexperienced in self-exertion, all, of travesties still more incongruous. untrained in self-reliance, socially and politically diseased, Canada was powerless to walk alone. She stood or fell by the mother country. And France, enfeebled by the same disease which had stunted the growth of her colony, was but the shadow of her former self. Entangled in a great European war, she could render no permanent resistance. Such were the causes which "ended the chequered story of New France," "a story which would have been a history if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode."

From Macmillan's Magazine.
MRS. DYMOND.

A priest serving his king before his God, a poet, with wilder blood and genius than his compeers, sitting with them at St. Stephens upon a dusty cushion, which he presently flings in their faces, and, in generous wrath and excitement, goes off to die, fighting for liberty, under the blue sky of Greece.

When Max du Parc, the son of a dreamer and of a downright and practical woman, found himself started in life in the little studio at the end of his mother's garden, he was certainly to blame in that he did not keep with peaceful devotion to the career into which fate had launched him, with so little effort on his own part. His engravings were excellent, but still more so were his etchings, boldly worked out, remarkable for their force, their color (and such a term may often be used with justice even where black and white alone are used). He had received his red ribbon with the rest of them for work done during the last two years, for medals gained As the actors pass across the stage of at exhibitions for etchings, some of which life and play their respective parts, it is were now hanging in gilt frames at St. not difficult at the outset to docket them Cloud among the eagles. Among others with their different characters- -a sol- he had worked for money as well as for dier, a parson, an artist, a lawyer, a lover, | love. The day before Susanna, seeing

BY MRS. RITCHIE.
CHAPTER XXI.

ALMSGIVING.

Once more Mrs. Dymond was leaning from her high window, impatiently scanning the figures coming and going along the pavement. Why did he keep them? The day was passing, the hours were waning. She was the most impatient of the party. There sat Jo, absorbed in his paint. ing. He was trying to copy the great blue china pot he had brought home from the Quai, and the pink poppies that Tempy had stuck into it, with their blue shadows and their silver-green leaves; Jo had a natural taste for still life. His step-waiscoat pocket: mother was grateful beyond words to those squares of color, to those neverfailing interests of form, of light, of arrangement, which interested him; she herself had no such natural gift; she was all the more glad when Jo, under Du

The note was disappointing, but it was | people; either he said what he meant, or no use delaying any longer.

"I have been with M. Caron. I am sorry you delayed for me," said Du Parc, as usual only addressing Susanna, who was giving Wilkins some parting directions as she took her cloak and her parasol from her faithful attendant.

Max seemed preoccupied at first and unlike himself, as they all walked along the street to the Quai whence the steamers started.

Susanna and the pursuit of pleasure were not at this moment the great preoccupations of his mind; other things less peaceful, less hopeful were daily closing up around him. There was a terrible reality to him in his apprehensions, all the more vivid because from his artistic qualities he belonged to the upper and more prescient classes, while from experience and birth he was near enough to the people to understand the tones of its voice, the wants of its daily life, its angry rising, and its present mood.

But by degrees, being in Susanna's company, he brightened up. Love re quires time and space, if it is not able to accomplish absolute impossibilities, but it certainly makes the most of the passing lights and moments of life.

"M. Caron detained me over the proofs of his book; it is coming out immediately," said Du Parc.

"You need not explain. We have nothing to do but to amuse ourselves, you have your work to attend to," said Susy gaily.

he let you see that he mistrusted you and was silent. He had great powers of work and a gift for enjoyment as well, which is perhaps more rare, and as he had walked along by Susy's side, with his bright looks and his odd swinging gait, he had seemed the very impersonation of a holiday maker, of a man at one with the mo ment. They were crossing the great court of the Louvre when a shadow came from behind a statue, and a frightened woman, starting out into the sunshine, suddenly put out a trembling white hand for alms. Susanna and her young people, from their English training, were passing on, they had a vague idea it was wrong to give to casual beggars, but Du Parc stopped short, and a curious little dialogue ensued.

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'Why are you begging, Madame Lebris?" said he roughly. "Are you ill?" "I am dying," said the woman quietly; "my children are starving."

"Where is your husband?"

"You know better than I do," she answered.

"Go home at once," said Du Parc. "I will come and see you this evening."

He thrust a napoleon into her hand. She took it with a weary look, and he nodded and hurried after the others. They were standing a few yards off waiting for him.

"I know the woman, she is the wife of a man who worked for me," he said in French, looking vexed and confused. He had paid away his last gold piece, and he had but a few sous left in his pocket. How was he to pay for his share of the dinner? Max had hardly recovered himself when he saw Mr. Bagginal. "Ah!" said he, "there is your friend!" and, as he spoke, our attaché, with an umbrella, a grievance, and a flower in his button-hole came up to meet them from the steamer steps.

Susanna had felt of late as if her relations with Du Parc were changed, and it seemed quite natural that he should give her details of his day's work. Max, too, realized that he was some one in her life, not a passer-by, but a fellow traveller. The holiday of the year had begun, and The two might very well have walked out with the sunshine the shores had quickof one of the galleries of the Louvre hardened with green, with song, with the stir by. She with her Grecian goddess looks, he of the dark, southern head with the black hair, that beaked nose, the dark, sudden eyes, so deeply set, eyes that were hard and soft by turns. He had scarcely ever talked to her before, and now at this moment, not for the first time, a sense of his reality, of the importance of his presence, of his goodwill, of his approbation and acquiescence with her conclusions came over her. There was a curious simplicity about Du Parc which impressed

of spreading life. There were two or three young men and women and some children on board, one or two experienced excursionists, some housekeepers, carry. ing their baskets, a village wedding, returning home after the ceremony; as the steamer stopped at each landing place in turn, the company passed off the boat. Scarcely any one remained by the time they were nearing St. Cloud. Jo was practising his French upon the man at the wheel. Tempy, much amused by the