least, this policy was rational and humane. They were promoting the ends
of commerce and national expansion. The foundations of French dominion
were to be laid deep in the heart and conscience of the savage. His
stubborn neck was to be subdued to the "yoke of the Faith." The power of
the priest established, that of the temporal ruler was secure. These
sanguinary hordes, weaned from intestine strife, were to unite in a
common allegiance to God and the King. Mingled with French traders and
French settlers, softened by French manners, guided by French priests,
ruled by French officers, their now divided bands would become the
constituents of a vast wilderness empire, which in time might span the
continent. Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization
scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.

Policy and commerce, then, built their hopes on the priests. These
commissioned interpreters of the Divine Will, accredited with letters
patent from Heaven, and affiliated to God's anointed on earth, would have
pushed to its most unqualified application the Scripture metaphor of the
shepherd and the sheep. They would have tamed the wild man of the woods
to a condition of obedience, unquestioning, passive, and absolute,--
repugnant to manhood, and adverse to the invigorating and expansive
spirit of modern civilization. Yet, full of error and full of danger as
was their system, they embraced its serene and smiling falsehoods with
the sincerity of martyrs and the self-devotion of saints.

We have spoken already of the Hurons, of their populous villages on the
borders of the great "Fresh Sea," their trade, their rude agriculture,
their social life, their wild and incongruous superstitions, and the
sorcerers, diviners, and medicine-men who lived on their credulity.
[ See Introduction. ] Iroquois hostility left open but one avenue to
their country, the long and circuitous route which, eighteen years before,