But new France was governed exclusively by the monarchy of its
metropolis; and was shut against the intellectual daring of its
philosophy, the liberality of its political economists, the movements of
its industrial genius, its legal skill, and its infusion of Protestant
freedom. Nothing representing the new activity of thought in modern
France, went to America. Nothing had leave to go there but what was old
and worn out.
The colonists from England brought over the forms of the government of
the mother country, and the purpose of giving them a better development
and a fairer career in the western world. The French emigrants took with
them only what belonged to the past, and nothing that represented
modern freedom. The English emigrants retained what they called English
privileges, but left behind in the parent country English inequalities,
the monarch, and nobility, and prelacy. French America was closed
against even a gleam of intellectual independence; nor did it contain so
much as one dissenter from the Roman Church; English America had English
liberties in greater purity and with far more of the power of the people
than England. Its inhabitants were self-organized bodies of freeholders,
pressing upon the receding forests, winning their way farther and
farther forward every year, and never going back.
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