In this volume Mr. Parkman has made a long step toward the culminating point of his historical series, and in the preface he announces that, passing over the intervening half century, he will make the fall of the French dominion in Canada the subject of his next book. There will then be more to relate of interest to readers in general than the events and personages of the present work can afford: this, nevertheless, has a peculiar value, as showing the opening of the rivalry between the French and English colonies, and exposing the causes which from the beginning rendered defeat inevitable for the former. These causes Mr. Parkman has already stated in the _Old Régime in Canada_, though less clearly and with an apparent tendency to consider that the result, after all, really came from an incapacity of the "French Celt" for self-government. More truly he now says that, had the Huguenots been allowed to settle in Canada, its fate would probably have been different. They represented that middle class to which was in great part due the success of the English settlements; and, standing shoulder to shoulder, as was their way, they would have formed a strong wall against encroachment and invasion. But Louis XIV. wished to exercise a more immediate control over his North American possessions than he might have found practicable had the too independent Huguenots been permitted to swarm into the land. Moreover, the colony, formed originally by the missionaries, retained its religious character to the very end. In the government the priest gradually gave way to the royal officer, though not without a contest: the jarrings between temporal and spiritual authorities were frequent, and not least so in Frontenac's time. He indeed lived in a constant state of quarrel with the Jesuits, who were, nevertheless, his right hand in external troubles. Canada was peopled by an "army of bigots," to use Napoleon's expression; and the priests kept alive the spirit of warlike piety which furthered so well the purposes of king and governor.