The principle of the hinterland was asserted so successfully in our early history that Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to claim territory as far west as the Mississippi River. It was by means of this hinterland claim that the young American republic succeeded in rounding out its northwestern possessions, after the War of the Revolution, and obtaining Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. All these would have been French if Champlain had made New England French; and the English colonies, if they had ever become strong enough to throw off the British yoke, would have consisted of a restricted section in the Southeast. Indeed, without Sam Adams, Otis, Warren, and Israel Putnam, without the revolt against the Stamp Act, and without Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, it is impossible to conceive of the American republic at all. Supposing it to have been constituted notwithstanding, it would have had to do without the influence of the New England town meeting, the New England common free school, the New England college, and the congregational system of church organization. It would have been deprived of the work of Franklin, Hancock, the Adamses, Webster, Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, Grant and the Shermans, in its affairs, and of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne and Parkman in its intellectual life. What would the New England country and the people have been like, if Champlain had never turned back from Plymouth Bay? We know from Benjamin Franklin's account what the progeny of the English settlers had become even as long ago as 1772. "I thought often," he wrote in that year, "of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!" What the Canadian habitant is to-day, we know. Very often he is unable to read or write, and his material and moral condition very low. Even as late as 1837 the Canadian provinces were still arbitrarily ruled by royal governors, with appointed councils or upper houses which had a veto on all legislation. There was no self-rule, and the mass of the French people were illiterate and miserably poor. Sieur Samuel de Champlain did a good day's work for English-speaking America, and the great free republic that was to be, when he pointed his prow northward and sailed away, out of sight of Cape Cod, in the summer of 1605. CHAPTER IX IF CHARLES II HAD ACCEPTED THE KINGSHIP OF VIRGINIA