The Huguenots were the best of the French traders; they were men of substance; they were capable, enterprising, and resolute. They were beyond others of their countrymen, the pioneers of trade and colonization, and had led the way in the New World. De Monts was a Huguenot, the De Caens were Huguenots, Champlain himself is said to have been of Huguenot parentage. The exclusion of the French Protestants from Canada meant depriving Canada of the class of Frenchmen who were most capable of colonizing the country and developing its trade. Their fault, in the eyes of the French Government, was their independence; that they did not conform to the state religion, and that by not conforming they were politically an element of danger. But what was deemed a fault in France would, in colonizing America, have been a virtue; inasmuch as in the field of adventure, trade, and settlement in new lands, the men who are least bound by old-world systems and traditional views are of most value. If fair play had been given to the French Protestants, Canada would have been far stronger than it {74} ever was while it belonged to France, and probably it would have continued to belong to France down to the present day. For the closing of Canada to the Huguenots, followed as it was afterwards by their ejection from France, not only weakened France and her colonies, but strengthened the rival nations and their colonies. The French citizens who had begun to build up the French colonial empire, helped to build up instead the colonial empires of other European nations; and the oppressions which they suffered brought them the sympathy, at times the armed sympathy, of the Protestant nations of Europe. The rising of the citizens of La Rochelle was accompanied by war between England and France. Buckingham's expedition for the relief of the city, ill planned and ill led, was a fiasco, completing the ruin of the Rochellois instead of bringing them relief; but on the other side of the Atlantic, where English adventurers could take advantage of a time of war without being hampered by court favourites, there was a different tale to tell. [Sidenote: _David Kirke_]