The greatness of their difficulties, the scantiness of their means, the wisdom of many of their views are equally striking. More than one did their utmost to teach and improve their Indian neighbor. They forbade at an early date the selling to them of the destructive "fire water." Cadillac did so from the first; the Marquis de Vaudreuil reissued the same orders later. They soon discovered that the northern regions alone could produce wheat enough to feed the whole country, "though it should be quite peopled down to the sea." The question of labor was one of prominent difficulty and importance. Should it be hired labor of freemen or the compulsory labor of the imported negro? On this, one of those early French explorers, Charlevoix, summed up his opinion in the following memorable sentence: "Hired servants should be preferred. When the time of their service is expired they become inhabitants and increase the number of the King's natural subjects, whereas the slaves are always strangers. And who can be assured that by continually increasing in our colonies they will not one day become formidable enemies? Can we depend upon slaves who are only attached to us by fear and for whom the very land where they are born has not the dear name of mother country?" More striking than all was the observation of a Frenchman who never visited America, except in thought, but saw distinctly its future. When no one yet believed it, that great economist and statesman, Turgot, said: "America one day will be free." Years went on. The dark shadows and splendid rays of light with which French history is interwoven shone and vanished in their grand and awful alternance. One day the French flag was lowered in Louisiana; that was at the close of the Seven Years War. Another day the same flag was seen on the mast of a small vessel leaving the harbor at Bordeaux and sailing for America. The ship happened to bear the auspicious name of _La Victoire_, and it bore Lafayette. Then it was the alliance of 1778, and the coming on the same year of the first envoy accredited by any nation to this country, my predecessor, Gerard de Rayneval, a staunch friend of America; then the peace of 1783, when, with the assent of the whole world, to the joy of every French heart, 13 stars shone on the American flag. France recovered, then, neither Louisiana nor Canada, nor anything. But she never intended it. She won a friend, and such a friend is better than any province.