Louis--which is remembered in
Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him
their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become
better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years
later--there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon-
Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a
"churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock
of Quebec--whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of
the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris--had laid the foundations of
his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of
these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New
England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City
might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince.
An idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to appreciate the happy
destiny (or by whatever name the sequence of events may be called) not
that kept France out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but that put her
in a position to become the power that should in a very true sense force
the jealous, many-minded colonies of that strip into a union, make
possible the erection of that feeble union into a nascent nation, give it,
though under certain compulsion, territory to become a world-power, and
finally furnish it, if grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain
domain in which to develop a democratic and a nationalistic spirit strong
enough to hold a continent-wide people in one republic.
Pages:
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459