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With the fall of the Huron, fell the best hope of the Canadian
mission. They, and the stable and populous communities around them,
had been the rude material from which the Jesuit would have formed
his Christian empire in the wilderness; but, one by one, these
kindred peoples were uprooted and swept away, while the neighboring
Algonquins, to whom they had been a bulwark, were involved with them
in a common ruin. The land of promise was turned to a solitude and a
desolation. There was still work in hand, it is true,--vast regions
to explore, and countless heathens to snatch from perdition; but
these, for the most part, were remote and scattered hordes, from
whose conversion it was vain to look for the same solid and decisive
results.
In a measure, the occupation of the Jesuits was gone. Some of them
went home, "well resolved," writes the Father Superior, "to return
to the combat at the first sound of the trumpet;"1
while of those who remained, about twenty in number, several soon
fell victims to famine, hardship, and the Iroquois. A few years
more, and Canada ceased to be a mission; political and commercial
interests gradually became ascendant, and the story of Jesuit
propagandism was interwoven with her civil and military annals.
Here, then, closes this wild and bloody act of the great drama of
New France; and now let the curtain fall, while we ponder its
meaning.
The cause of the failure of the Jesuits is obvious. The guns and
tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes. Could they
have curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less
than certain that their dream would have become a reality. Savages
tamed--not civilized, for that was scarcely possible--would have
been distributed in communities through the valleys of the Great
Lakes and the Mississippi, ruled by priests in the interest of
Catholicity and of France. Their habits of agriculture would have
been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed.
The swift decline of the Indian population would have been arrested;
and it would have been made, through the fur-trade, a source of
prosperity to New France. Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a
rich commerce, she would have put forth a vigorous growth. True to
her far-reaching and adventurous genius, she would have occupied the
West with traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut up the virgin
wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of England were but
a weak and broken line along the shore of the Atlantic; and when at
last the great conflict came, England and Liberty would have been
confronted, not by a depleted antagonist, still feeble from the
exhaustion of a starved and persecuted infancy, but by an athletic
champion of the principles of Richelieu and of Loyola.
Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the
plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe
averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the
life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries,
and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they
changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty
and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would
have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete.
Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and
controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought,
would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of
that majestic experiment of which America is the field.
The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not
shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes
dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that
Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile let those who have
prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine
amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of
the torrent.
But now new scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage, a
hardy and valiant band, molded to endure and dare,--the Discoverers
of the Great West.
1 Lettre de Lalemant au R. P. Provincial
(Relation, 1650, 48).]
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The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, 1867
Jesuits
in North America
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