There follow twenty restless years in which Champlain's efforts are
divided between discovery and strengthening the little colony, and his
occupations between holding his Indian allies who lived along the northern
pathway to the west, fighting their enemies to the south, the Iroquois,
restraining the jealousies of merchants and priests, trade and missions,
reconciling Catholics and Huguenots, going nearly every year to France in
the interests of the colony, building and repairing, yielding for a time
to the overpowering ships of the English. The grizzled soldier and
explorer, restored and commissioned anew under the fostering and firm
support of Richelieu, struggled to the very end of his life to make the
feeble colony, which eighteen years after its founding "could scarcely be
said to exist but in the founder's brain," not chiefly an agricultural
settlement but a spiritual centre from which the interior was to be
explored and the savage hordes won--at the same time to heaven and to
France--subdued not by being crushed but by being civilized, not by the
sword but by the cross.
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