FRENCH CHIVALRY IN THE SOUTHWEST.

COMMERCE was a late birth of Time. Its infancy dates from the Portuguese discoveries of the fifteenth century. Its growth was a rapid one; and even in the season of its youth, such was its Titanic strength of muscle and grasp, that, as with a volatile glee, it shook the world out of its long slumber in the dormitory of superstition. The mind of the world, in a sort of nightmare, had been engrossed for ages with abstract opinions. Loyalty to the central principle of authority had bound men with slavish manacles. Religion-such religion as they had-was the pivot of all national, social, domestic and individual movement. Under the plea of its requisition, Europe armed itself against the infidel; and the Catholic empires fitted out exterminating expeditions against the inoffensive Albigenses. With its sanction Ferdinand the Catholic summoned his steel-clad warriors to battle against the Moors of Granada; and the pious Isabella inaugurated the ferocious horrors of

the Inquisition. The journeys which men undertook were chiefly pilgrimages to holy shrines. All forms of industry, all types of genius, were subordinated to the sway of credulity. The sword was unsheathed and continents were deluged in blood in behalf of the speculations of sophists. Princes ruled in virtue of divine right; and in their eyes the people were as the fine dust of the summer threshing-floor. The religious wars begun by Constantine, were continued through the sixteenth century. During a night of nearly fourteen hundred years great forces were engaged in fearful struggles; but human rights greater than the forces, lay in a deep unbroken slumber. The strength of the knight, and the craft of the priest, the one wielding sharp-edged iron, the other, book, bell and candle, fought with or against each other. The one asserted the supremacy of brute force; the other of intellectual power. Both were alike intent upon the establishment of despotism. Feudalism and Romanism-the throne and the churchequally sought their continuance by the sacrifice of the rights of the many, to the advantage of the few. The crown and the altar were to be perpetuated at the expense of humanity. Their rapacious lust for gold sealed the act of their discomfiture. Navigation unlocked the treasures of new worlds; the priest and the soldier hastened to possess themselves of the spoil; but in due time the citizen came to laugh at

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the thunders of the Vatican and the sceptre of the prince.

At first, sovereigns sought to employ commerce as they had before used the sword and the brain-to further the ends of tyranny; but the young giant was mightier than his old masters; he smote them down and laughed them to scorn.

The theory of conquest and of colonization in the New World adopted by the European monarchs was virtually this: that the recently acquired territory was to be subjected to the supreme will of the king, and tributary to the profit and pleasure of himself and his capital. Mexico, Peru, and the Indies were regarded by Charles and Philip as so many orchards and mines, whose products might gratify the royal palate and fill the royal coffers. Elizabeth, James and Charles seemed to consider Newfoundland and New England simply as fisheries, the sole business of whose people it was to supply Britain with cod and mackerel; while Louis the Fourteenth granted to his favorites unlimited demesnes in New France and on the Mississippi, and charters of monopoly for the fur trade therein. The great monarch's courtiers and mistresses wanted costly peltries to decorate their noble persons; to this end the Indians might hunt on the borders of Superior or by the banks of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, and the traders transport their precious merchandise from

Quebec. No vessels, save those under the flag of the proprietary monarch, might trade in a provincial port. Thus did the kings seek to bind the infant commerce with the fetters of monopoly.

In due time the regulation of trade comes to be regarded as a prime article in treaties between nations. The courts of Madrid, Paris and London are bidders for the tribute of the seas. All the arts of diplomacy are brought to bear by the royal competitors and their envoys, to gain the coveted prize. The tactics of negotiation are exhausted in many a keen encounter; but first Spain, and afterwards France are outwitted, and England, by the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, is acknowledged mistress of the deep.

I have thought it might be an attempt not devoid of interest, to place before you the effort of France to transplant Feudalism into the soil of the New World, and to carry thither her chivalry. In virtue of the discoveries of James Marquette the Jesuit and priest, the first European who sailed on the waters of the upper Mississippi, and of the Sieur Robert Cavalier de la Salle, the bold trader, the first to follow the stream to the sea, France laid claim to all the regions bordering the Father of Waters, and upon his tributaries. The tract extended from the foot of the Appalachian chain to the head-waters of the Missouri; from the Balize to Itasca Lake. But it was a dim cloudy realm to Europeans; known

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to them only by the marvellous and exaggerated reports which had reached them from the few explorers. The Mississippi had never been entered from the Gulf except by Andrew de Pez, a Spaniard, about 1680, and of his discovery no trace remained. The brave La Salle had perished in attempting to find its mouth. But the difficulty of the discovery only the more inflamed the imagination and enthusiasm of France, already kindled by the reported goodliness of the land. As soon as the Grand Monarque had brief space to rest from his wars, he gave heed to the importunate cravings of some of his subjects that they might go out and possess the fruitful and illimitable region to which the name of Louisiana was given in honor of his most Christian majesty. A little fleet of two frigates and two smaller vessels was fitted out in the port of Rochelle, from which the illstarred La Salle had sailed fourteen years before. The command was intrusted to D'Iberville, a noble admiral of the French navy, who had spent most of his life in the New World, warring with the icebergs, or the more implacable fury of his English adversaries about Hudson's Bay. A man of strict integrity, undaunted courage and unblemished reputation, idolized by his countrymen, and the most approved officer of the French navy, he was now to try his fortunes in a region bordering upon the tropics. With him sailed his two younger brothers, Sauvolle