Lower Canada, the basin of the St. Lawrence, was rightly included under the wider name of New France, for here France and the French were reproduced in weakness and in strength. It was a land well suited to the French character and physique. Much depended on tactful dealings with the North American Indians, a species of diplomacy in which Frenchmen excelled. The commercial value of Canada consisted mainly in the fur trade, an adventurous kind of traffic more attractive to the {36} Frenchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than plodding agriculture or the life of a counting-house. On the rivers and lakes, coming and going was comparatively easy; the short bright summers and the long winters made the country one of strong contrasts. To a bold, imaginative, somewhat restless people there was much to charm in Canada. But Canada meant far less in earlier days than now it means. It meant the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, and of the lakes from which it flows. The Maritime Provinces of the present Dominion, or at any rate Nova Scotia, were not in Canada properly so called, but bore the name of La Cadie or Acadia,[1] and the great North-West was an unknown land. [Footnote 1: For the derivation of the name 'Acadia,' see Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_, p. 243, note. _Cadie_ is an Indian word meaning place or region. 'It is obviously a Micmac or Souriquois affix used in connexion with other words to describe the natural characteristics of a place or locality' (Bourinot's monograph on 'Cape Breton,' _Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada_, vol. ix, sec. 2, p. 185). For the name 'Canada,' see above, p. 24. note 37.] By the end of the seventeenth century the French had three spheres of influence and colonization in North America--the country of the St. Lawrence, the seaboard between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the New England colonies, and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. To join them and encircle the English colonies was the aim of French statesmanship. It was an impossible aim, inevitably frustrated by geographical conditions and by want of colonists; but the conception was a great one, large as the new continent in which it was framed, and able men tried to work it out, but tried in vain. [Sidenote: _The French as colonizers._] Much has been written of French methods of colonization; writers have been at pains to enumerate the shortcomings of the French, and have carefully explained whence those mistakes arose. But there is less to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes to be credited to France. Being {37} part of the continent of Europe, and ever embroiled in continental politics, when she competed with England as a colonizing power, she competed with one hand tied.[2] Changeable, it is said, were the French and their policy; their kings and courtiers may have been changeable, but the charge does not lie against the French nation.