We may dismiss the French in a few pages, merely because they are only so much like their neighbours. It would have been a glorious circumstance to have been able to present them as an exception; but while they have shown as little regard to the rights or feelings of the people whose lands they have invaded for the purpose of colonization, they seem to have been on the whole more commonplace in their cruelties. In Guiana they drove back the Indians as the Dutch and the Portuguese did in their adjoining settlements. In the West Indies, they exterminated or enslaved the natives very much as other Europeans did. They were as assiduous as any people in massacring the Charaibs, and they suffered perhaps more than any other nation from the Charaibs in return. Their historian, Du Tertre, describes them as returning from a slaughtering expedition in St. Christopher’s “_bien joyeux_;” so that it would appear as though they executed the customary murders of the time, with their accustomed gaiety. In the Mauritius they found nobody to kill. In Madagascar, they alternately massacred and were massacred themselves, and finally driven out of of the country by the exasperated natives for their cruelties. If they made themselves masters of countries of equal importance with the Spaniards, Portuguese, English, or even the Dutch, they had not the art to make them so, for if we include Louisiana, Canada, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Madagascar, Mauritius, Guiana, various West Indian islands and settlements on the Indian and African coasts, the amount of territory is vast. The value of it to them, however, at no time, was ever proportionate in the least degree to the extent; and no European nation has been so unfortunate in the loss of colonies. Their attempt to possess themselves of Florida was abortive, but it was attended by a circumstance which deserves recording.