But there was a very dark side to the French policy and system in regard to the North American Indians. In the first place, as has been abundantly shown in the preceding pages, the French authorities, temporal and spiritual, kept the savages on their side by sanctioning, or at least not repressing, their savagery; and notably the mission Indians of Canada, the special protégés of the priests, were foremost in barbarous warfare against white Christians of a different shade of religion. In the second place, the political system of Canada, which indirectly created the Canadian vagrants, the _coureurs de bois_, produced, in doing so, indianized Frenchmen, differing little from frenchified Indians. Here again we can take Charlevoix's testimony. He writes that 'some vagabonds, who had taken a liking to independency and a wandering life, had remained among the savages, from whom they could not be distinguished but by their vices.'[10] If the French were more human than the English in their dealings with the Indians, they were more human for evil as well as for good; and, whatever was the result on the Indians, {343} there is no question as to the result on the French and English respectively, of their different lines of action towards the red men. The English race gained greatly in the end in soundness and in progress, from keeping outside the Indian circle and not coming down to the Indian level. [Footnote 10: Charlevoix (as above), p. 34.] [Sidenote: _Merits of French settlement in Canada._]