Cross in hand, they led their Indian converts to battle; nor do they seem to have softened the asperities of Indian warfare, doubtless looking on fire and steel as the best discipline for their heretical foes. Children taken in war they were accustomed to keep and bring up as Catholics; and this desire to save souls, which was communicated by the fathers to the whole population, helps to explain why captives among the Canadians, as among the Indians, so often forgot their homes and were unwilling to return to them. Both French and savages received their prisoners into their families, and treated them as they did those of their own blood--the latter to make good their losses in war by the adoption of new members into the tribe, the former as well from natural kindliness as moved by eagerness for the spiritual welfare of the benighted. The English, like the Plains Indians of the present day, had no such motives; and those living in captivity among them, however kindly treated, remained aliens, and seized gladly any opportunity of regaining their freedom. Mr. Parkman, while doing full justice to the ability, valor and self-sacrifice of the priests, condemns of course their acceptance, and even approval, of such barbarous customs as torture and the killing of non-combatants; and this blame extends itself to the French generally, with whose adoption of savage practices he compares the self-restraint and mercifulness of the New Englanders, even when, as at the time of the capture of Port Royal, exasperated by the recent massacre of their countrymen. The causes of this difference of conduct are not far to seek, though Mr. Parkman does not explain them, being perhaps inclined to refer it to national character. The war-parties that left Quebec and Montreal consisted of soldiers, trained to the manner of war which in the first half of that century turned much of Germany into a desert, or of Indians and trappers, red and white savages, who inflicted cruelty on others with all the indifference which they displayed in bearing it. The forces of New England, on the other hand, were composed of fishermen and farmers, men with families and engaged in peaceful occupations, to which war came as an unwelcome interruption. Murder had not been taught them as a duty, but forbidden as a crime; and, more gentle by habit, it was not to be expected but that they would display far more moderation in bloodshedding.