France and England in North America A Series of Historical Narratives. by Francis Parkman Author of the "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," "The Oregon Trail," "The Old Régime in Canada," etc. Part Fifth. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1877. Entered According to Act of Congress in the year 1877, by Francis Parkman, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV. by Francis Parkman Author of "Pioneers of France in the New World," "The Jesuits in North America," "The Discovery of the Great West," and "The Old Régime in Canada." Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1877. Entered According to Act of Congress in the year 1877, by Francis Parkman, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son. PREFACE. The events recounted in this book group themselves in the main about a single figure, that of Count Frontenac, the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal to every crisis. His whole career was one of conflict, sometimes petty and personal, sometimes of momentous consequence, involving the question of national ascendancy on this continent. Now that this question is put at rest for ever, it is hard to conceive the anxiety which it wakened in our forefathers. But for one rooted error of French policy, the future of the English-speaking races in America would have been more than endangered. Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of the rival powers, and the opening of the grand scheme of military occupation by which France strove to envelop and hold in check the industrial populations of the English colonies. It was he who made that scheme possible. In "The Old Régime in Canada," I tried to show from what inherent causes this wilderness empire of the Great Monarch fell at last before a foe, superior indeed in numbers, but lacking all the forces that belong to a system of civil and military centralization. The present volume will show how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendors and the regal pomp of Versailles.