Five years elapsed before the author was able to complete the fourth volume of the series, "The Old Régime in Canada," which was published in 1874. In the preface he quotes De Tocqueville, who said: "The physiognomy of a government can best be judged by its colonies, for there its characteristic traits usually appear larger and more distinct. When I wish to judge of the spirit and the faults of the administration of Louis XIV., I must go to Canada. Its deformity is there seen as through a microscope." Mr. Parkman, in "The Old Régime in Canada," portrayed the attempt of the monarchical administration of France to make good its hold on the North American continent. "The means of knowing the Canada of the past," wrote Mr. Parkman, "are ample. The pen was always busy in this outpost of the old monarchy. The king and the minister demanded to know everything; and officials of high and low degree, soldiers and civilians, friends and foes, poured letters, despatches, and memorials, on both sides of every question, into the lap of the government." Among the strikingly important events treated of in this work are the Jesuit Missions to Onondaga, the Holy Wars of Montreal, the heroic death of Dollard and his companions at Long Saut, the foundation of the Laval Seminary, the chastisement of the Mohawks, the importation of wives for the Canada emigrants, the transplantation of feudalism into Canada, the development of trade and industry in New France, etc. An entire volume of the series is devoted to the Life of Count Frontenac, the great French governor of Canada. "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV." was issued in 1877. Parkman describes him in the preface as "the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. He grew with every emergency and rose equal to every crisis. Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of the great rival Powers.... 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 splendor and the regal pomp of Versailles." A large portion of the volume is devoted to the warfare between the French and English, including the Iroquois Invasion, the attack on Schenectady, the unsuccessful Massachusetts attack on Quebec under Sir William Phips, the border warfare against New England, and the war in Acadia.