With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little connexion with the {46} land of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa. Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough, somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character, in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this, that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency, because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities. The French policy was {47} one of conquest and conversion; they looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy. Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present also in Canada--antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules; and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders and _coureurs de bois_. But in South Africa the positive force was