Note 434 — Chapter XV

"In observing on old maps the extent of the ancient French colonies in America, I was haunted by one painful idea. I asked myself how the government of my country could have left colonies to perish which would now be to us a source of inexhaustible prosperity. From Acadia and Canada to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to that of the Mississippi, the territories of New France surrounded what originally formed the confederation of the thirteen United States. The eleven other states, the district of Columbia, the Michigan, Northwest, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas territories, belonged, or would have belonged to us, as they now belong to the United States, by the cession of the English and Spaniards, our first heirs in Canada and in Louisiana. More than two thirds of North America would acknowledge the sovereignty of France.... We possessed here vast countries which might have offered a home to the excess of our population, an important market to our commerce, a nursery to our navy. Now we are forced to confine in our prisons culprits condemned by the tribunals, for want of a spot of ground whereon to place these wretched creatures. We are excluded from the New World, where the human race is recommencing. The English and Spanish languages serve to express the thoughts of many millions of men in Africa, in Asia, in the South Sea Islands, on the continent of the two Americas; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our courage and our genius, hear the language of Racine, of Colbert, and of Louis XIV. spoken merely in a few hamlets of Louisiana and Canada, under a foreign sway. There it remains, as though but for an evidence of the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy. Thus, then, has France disappeared from North America, like those Indian tribes with which she sympathized, and some of the wrecks of which I have beheld."—Chateaubriand's Travels in America, vol. ii., p. 207.