As regarded their intercourse with the Indians, the versatile French seemed to acquire much greater influence over these children of the forest than the stern and uncompromising settlers of New England. The remarks of the historian Hildreth on this subject deserve attention. “The French missionaries, better acquainted with human nature and the philosophy of religion, were more moderate in their demands and more tender in their treatment. Though themselves enthusiasts of the highest pitch, they asked not so much of their converts ecstacies and metaphysics as admiring reverence and ceremonial observances, which ever constitute the religion of the multitude. Themselves in the highest degree self-denying and ascetic, surpassing in this respect even their puritan rivals, they yet looked with fatherly indulgence on the human weaknesses and easily-besetting sins of their converts. These converts were admitted to all the privileges of French subjects; intermarriages became frequent—for prejudices of caste were much less strong on the part of the French than of the English—and thence resulted a mixed race; the Canadian couriers of the woods, boatmen and woodsmen, combining the hardihood and activity of the Indian, with the more docile, manageable and persevering temper of the French. There were dozens of Jesuit missionaries employed in New France, not less zealous than Eliot, and far more enterprising, whose travels and adventures show religious influences and theocratic ideas not less operative in the first exploration of the distant West, than in the original settlement of New England.”