For at least the first hundred years of its existence, Quebec was New France; and the story of Quebec in that period is the story of all Canada. The fortress was the heart and soul of French enterprise in the New World. From the Castle of St. Louis, on the summit of Cape Diamond, went forth mandates, heard and obeyed in distant Louisiana. The monastic city on the St. Lawrence was the centre of the web of missions, which slowly spread from the dark Saguenay to Lake Superior. The fearful tragedies of Indian warfare had their birth in the early policy of Quebec. The fearless voyageurs, whose canoes glided into unknown waters, ever westward--towards Cathay, as they believed--made Quebec their base for exploration. And as time went on, the rock-built stronghold of the north became the nerve-centre of that half-century of conflict which left the flag of Britain waving in victory on the Plains of Abraham. When Montcalm in his last hours consigned to the care of the British conquerors the colonists he had loved and for whom he had fought, he proclaimed a momentous epoch in the world's history--the loss of an Empire to a great nation of Europe and the gain of an Empire to another. Within a generation the Saxon Conquistador was to suffer the same humiliation, and to yield up that colonial territory from which Quebec had been assailed; but the fortress city was always to both nations the keystone of the arch of power on the American continent. When she was lost to France, Louisiana, that vast territory along the Mississippi--a kingdom in itself--still remained, but no high memory cherished it, no national hope hung over it, and a hundred years ago Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the new Western power--the United States. As a nation the labours of France were finished in America on the day that De Ramézay yielded up the keys of the city, and Wolfe's war-worn legions marched through St. Louis Gate from the Plains of Abraham.