What
it desired, the "common good," was the immediate payment of the debt
incurred in the War of Independence, and the only resource was land. The
land that the French had discovered, whose nominal transfer to England
Choiseul had said he had made to destroy England's power in America, was
now to meet a portion at least of the expense of the brave struggle for
the winning of independence. France's practically untouched wilderness was
now to supplement the succor of French ships and arms and sympathy in the
firm founding of the new nation. The acres that France under other
fortunes might have divided among her own descendants, children of the
west, she gave to a happier destiny than La Salle could have desired in
his wildest dreams as he traversed the streams that watered those first-
parcelled fields.
So, incidentally, the French pioneers before the fact and the first
settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting,
willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark
and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the
Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and
along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes
and their lives--these all had their part in the inauguration of this
experiment in self-government.
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