The events recounted in this book group themselves in the main about a
single figure, that of Count Frontenac, the most remarkable man who
ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely
unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal
to every crisis. His whole career was one of conflict, sometimes petty
and personal, sometimes of momentous consequence, involving the
question of national ascendancy on this continent. Now that this
question is put at rest for ever, it is hard to conceive, the anxiety
which it wakened in our forefathers. But for one rooted error of
French policy, the future of the English-speaking races in America
would have been more than endangered.

Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of
the rival powers, and the opening of the grand scheme of military
occupation by which France strove to envelop and hold in check the
industrial populations of the English colonies. It was he who made
that scheme possible.

In "The Old Regime in Canada," I tried to show from what inherent
causes this wilderness empire of the Great Monarch fell at last before
a foe, superior indeed in numbers, but lacking all the forces that
belong to a system of civil and military centralization. The present
volume will show how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New
France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made
inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted
among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendors and
the regal pomp of Versailles.

The authorities on which the book rests are drawn chiefly from the
manuscript collections of the French government in the Archives