U? J THE HISTORY OF CHAPTER I⠀⠀⠀⠀ORNK HOW LOUISIANA CAME TO BE WHEN Thiers, in his History of the Consulate and Empire, comes to speak of the sale of Louisiana by Bonaparte to the United States, he says, "The United States are indebted for their birth and for their greatness to the long struggle between France and England."* American pride dislikes to admit that our independence was not due to our own efforts; that the well-trained leaders and 7,000 good French troops who did such service at Yorktown, while the Count de Grasse, at the mouth of the Chesapeake, blocked the path for the reenforcements which Cornwallis was expecting, were a decisive factor in our war. * Vol. ii, p. 499. Translation. That point we are not concerned to argue; but as regards the second point of M. Thiers -that the vast dimensions of our nation are due to an influence from Europe, America itself having had less to do with the matter than has been claimed -it is the purpose of this book to show that the facts of history bear the French writer out. That the United States in 1803 became immensely extended in territory; that at the same time our interpre tation of the Constitution became enlarged, so that henceforth "the spirit and not the letter was appealed to," making further development possible-a change in the American point of view which has affected us profoundly*- all this came about because France and England at this moment were in a crisis of their immemorial quarrel, and Na * Sloan, Life of Napoleon, vol. iv, pp. 247, 248. poleon saw a way out of his difficulty by helping the United States to broad dominion. Taking up the story of Louisiana, then, from the French side, as it is certainly proper to do since it came to us through French statesmanship with little agency of our own, the remark of M. Leroy-Beaulieu will open the consideration well:* "Colonization is for France a question of life or death. France will either become a great African power, or in a century or two it will be nothing but a secondary European power. It will count in the world about as Greece or Roumania count in Europe." To-day, thinks this leader, it is vital to the position of France that she should be a colonizing power, Africa being the sphere at the present moment open. Four hundred years ago the same thought seems to have ruled, America being in that day the field; for France became active among the earliest, after the discoveries of Columbus and the *"La colonisation est pour la France une question de vie ou de mort: ou la France deviendra une grande puissance africaine, ou elle ne sera dans un siècle ou deux qu'un puissance européenne secondaire: comptera dans le monde à peu près comme la Grèce ou la Roumanie comptent en Europe." Portuguese, in fixing her grasp upon the new lands. Between 1504 and 1603 eighteen separate expeditions were made to America.* In the latter year it was that Samuel Champlain set out to found Canada. Mr. Walter Frewen Lord points out that the driving force in French colonization, then as always, has been the spirit of adventure. Until the present day a series of brilliant adventurers can be traced, vividly Champlain imaginative, intrepid, indefatigable, often of great capacity: types of the class are Champlain, and in our time Marchand of Fashoda. By such men everything possible to individ ual prowess has been done repeatedly. The reason why results have been meager and so often not permanent, says the English critic, is that the explorers have not been sustained. Kings as a general rule have been quite in * Walter Frewen Lord, Lost Empires of the Modern World. different; there has been no national or popular movement to back up the pathfinders. It must also be said that the pathfinders, when cooperation was important, have shown too often a disposition to quarrel, rather than to combine forces. Call it vanity, or call it by the higher name ambition—the craving to possess the admiration of the world-this quality seems to burn in the heart of a Frenchman with especial intensity; so that often through brooking no rival near him, the hero lets his enterprise go to utter wreck, a fate which a better harmony in the actors would have prevented. To glance for a moment at a region far away from Louisiana, the story of the French in the East Indies is very illustrative. Why is not India to-day the possession of France rather than England? The French were there before the English; Europe has never sent out to a foreign strand abler men than those who stood for France. They failed because the Government was supine, because there was no backing from the people; more than all, perhaps, because they fell out among themselves. They directed against one an |