"
When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal,
anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic
timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory,
predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King
Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St. Lawrence--communities governed by
the warlike, restless spirit.
The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats,
whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the
plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot
easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than
did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems,
government of a village along the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi, from a
palace by the Seine where a hard-working monarch issued edicts "in the
fulness of our power and of our certain knowledge."
The ordinances preserved in the colonial records furnish abundant proof of
that parental concern and restraint.
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