army which certainly impresses me more than any other.”  Thus spoke Louis XV. on the eve of the battle of Fontenoy Marshal Saxe was about to confer upon the French arms a transitory lustre; but the king, who loaded him with riches and honors, never forgot that he was not his born subject.  “I allow that Count Saxe is the best officer to command that we have,” he would say; “but he is a Huguenot, he wants to be supreme, and he is always saying that, if he is thwarted, he will enter some other service.  Is that zeal for France?  I see, however, very few of ours who aim high like him.”

The king possessed at a distance, in the colonies of the Two Indies, as the expression then was, faithful servants of France, passionately zealous for her glory, “aiming high,” ambitious or disinterested, able politicians or heroic pioneers, all ready to sacrifice both property and life for the honor and power of their country:  it is time to show how La Bourdonnais, Dupleix, Bussy, Lally-Tollendal were treated in India; what assistance, what guidance, what encouragement the Canadians and their illustrious chiefs received from France, beginning with Champlain, one of the founders of the colony, and ending with Montcalm, its latest defender.  It is a painful but a salutary spectacle to see to what meannesses a sovereign and a government may find themselves reduced through a weak complaisance towards the foreigner, in the feverish desire of putting an end to a war frivolously undertaken and feebly conducted.

French power in India threw out more lustre, but was destined to speedier, and perhaps more melancholy, extinction than in Canada.  Single-handed in the East the chiefs maintained the struggle against the incapacity of the French government and the dexterous tenacity of the enemy; in America the population of French extraction upheld to the bitter end the name, the honor, and the flag of their country.  “The fate of France,” says Voltaire, “has nearly always been that her enterprises, and even her successes, beyond her own frontiers should become fatal to her.”  The defaults of the government and the jealous passions of the colonists themselves, in the eighteenth century, seriously aggravated the military reverses which were to cost the French nearly all their colonies.

More than a hundred years previously, at the outset of Louis XIV.’s personal reign, and through the persevering efforts of Colbert marching in the footsteps of Cardinal Richelieu, an India Company had been founded for the purpose of developing French commerce in those distant regions, which had always been shrouded in a mysterious halo of fancied wealth and grandeur.  Several times the Company had all but perished; it had revived under the vigorous impulse communicated by Law, and had not succumbed at the collapse of his system.  It gave no money to its shareholders, who derived their benefits only from a partial concession of the tobacco. revenues, granted by the king to the Company, but its directors