In Canada, all was different. Living by the fur trade, she needed free range and indefinite space. Her geographical position determined the nature of her pursuits; and her pursuits developed the roving and adventurous character of her people, who, living under a military rule, could be directed at will to such ends as their rulers saw fit. The grand French scheme of territorial extension was not born at court, but sprang from Canadian soil, and was developed by the chiefs of the colony, who, being on the ground, saw the possibilities and requirements of the situation, and generally had a personal interest in realizing them. The rival colonies had two different laws of growth. The one increased by slow extension, rooting firmly as it spread; the other shot offshoots, with few or no roots, far out into the wilderness. It was the nature of French colonization to seize upon detached strategic points, and hold them by the bayonet, forming no agricultural basis, but attracting the Indians by trade, and holding them by conversion. A musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins may serve to represent it, and in fact it consisted of little else. Whence came the numerical weakness of New France, and the real though latent strength of her rivals? Because, it is answered, the French were not an emigrating people; but, at the end of the seventeenth century, this was only half true. The French people were divided into two parts, one eager to emigrate, and the other reluctant. The one consisted of the persecuted Huguenots, the other of the favored Catholics. The government chose to construct its colonies, not of those who wished to go, but of those who wished to stay at home. From the hour when the edict of Nantes was revoked, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen would have hailed as a boon the permission to transport themselves, their families, and their property to the New World. The permission was fiercely refused, and the persecuted sect was denied even a refuge in the wilderness. Had it been granted them, the valleys of the west would have swarmed with a laborious and virtuous population, trained in adversity, and possessing the essential qualities of self-government. Another France would have grown beyond the Alleghanies, strong with the same kind of strength that made the future greatness of the British colonies. British America was an asylum for the oppressed and the suffering of all creeds and nations, and population poured into her by the force of a natural tendency. France, like England, might have been great in two hemispheres, if she had placed herself in accord with this tendency, instead of opposing it; but despotism was consistent with itself, and a mighty opportunity was for ever lost.