These services,
intended and unintended, negative and positive, grudging and voluntary,
performed, however, all in unsurpassed sacrifice and valiance not only of
the explorers and priests but of the exiled soldiers, intimate how, out of
all the misery of finding the northern water gate and keeping it and
following the northern waterway and fortifying it, came the harvests--even
if France did not gather them into her own granaries--of those who "sow by
all waters."
We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or
Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we
might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we
have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these
hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at
the north.
But what I wish to emphasize here--and I am much indebted to the young
western historian Mr. Hulbert, for this view--is that France, struggling
to keep the empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and western
valleys of America, gave to the world George Washington.
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