hundred and sixty thousand white inhabitants.  By the census of 1754 Canada had but fifty-five thousand.[1] Add those of Louisiana and Acadia, and the whole white population under the French flag might be something more than eighty thousand.  Here is an enormous disparity; and hence it has been argued that the success of the English colonies and the failure of the French was not due to difference of religious and political systems, but simply to numerical preponderance.  But this preponderance itself grew out of a difference of systems.  We have said before, and it cannot be said too often, that in making Canada a citadel of the state religion—­a holy of holies of exclusive Roman Catholic orthodoxy,—­the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a trans-Atlantic empire.  New France could not grow with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him.  One of the ablest of Canadian governors, La Galissoniere, seeing the feebleness of the colony compared with the vastness of its claims, advised the King to send ten thousand peasants to occupy the valley of the Ohio, and hold back the British swarm that was just then pushing its advance-guard over the Alleghanies.  It needed no effort of the King to people his waste domain, not with ten thousand peasants, but with twenty times ten thousand Frenchmen of every station,—­the most industrious, most instructed, most disciplined by adversity and capable of self-rule, that the country could boast.  While La Galissoniere was asking for colonists, the agents of the Crown, set on by priestly fanaticism, or designing selfishness masked with fanaticism, were pouring volleys of musketry into Huguenot congregations, imprisoning for life those innocent of all but their faith,—­the men in the galleys, the women in the pestiferous dungeons of Aigues Mortes,—­hanging their ministers, kidnapping their children, and reviving, in short, the dragonnades.  Now, as in the past century, many of the victims escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of them.  The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the valleys of the West.  It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and changed the face of the continent.  The opportunity was spurned.  The dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin.  France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded.

[Footnote 1:  Censuses of Canada, iv. 61.  Rameau (La France aux Colonies, ii. 81) estimates the Canadian population, in 1755, at sixty-six thousand, besides voyageurs, Indian traders, etc.  Vaudreuil, in 1760, places it at seventy thousand.]