Note 27:4 — Chapter III

The contrast is vigorously emphasized by Mr. Bancroft: "Such was Louisiana more than a half-century after the first attempt at colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with pride and liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the Company of the Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages; but still the valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its patrons—though among them it counted kings and ministers of state—had not accomplished for it in half a century a tithe of the prosperity which within the same period sprang naturally from the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware" (vol. iii., p. 369).