Despite these disadvantages, the St. Lawrence system doubtless gave the French a vast advantage in the race for empire on this continent. When we consider that for a long time they had the control of the Mississippi as well, it seems surprising that their power was ever broken. The facilities which this water system gave to military movements that took the whole of the English colonies in the rear was not the sole advantage it afforded its first European possessors; though, on the other hand, it must be remembered that the strategic movements of the English were on interior lines, if largely indeed without water-ways. It was the key to the best of the fur-trade country, and to the best fisheries in America. For the first hundred years after the settlement of this country, furs and fish were the only exports of value from the region north of Maryland. The French settlements gave them control of the best fishery grounds, as also the trade with the Indians, who occupied the best country for peltries in the world. As soon as the English came to possess it, this trade was greatly developed. Along with these advantages, the country had many evils that made the beginnings of colonies a matter of great labor and difficulty. The soil is made up of drift, and requires a great amount of labor to fit it for tillage. The greater part of it is north of the maize belt, so that this cheap and highly nutritious food was denied to the people. I have already said something concerning the singular advantages that this grain had for the pioneer in the American forests. I am inclined to believe that the want of this plant in the French colonies was one cause of their slow development. Another hindrance lay in the very long and severe winters. This limited the time which could be given to the tillage of land, and made the keeping of domesticated animals a matter of great difficulty. Something, too, must be attributed to the character of the colonists and to the nature of the land-tenure in this region. Their system of immigration gave a smaller proportion of natural leaders to the people, so that the colony always remained in a closer dependence on the mother country. There was always an absence of the initiative power which so marked the English colonies. The seigniorial systems of Europe have never prospered in America, and the early experiments in founding colonies by the mere exportation of men to this soil were failures even when the men were of English blood. The efforts to colonize the seaboard region of North Carolina without giving the fee of the land to the people, and without care in the selection of the colonists, resulted in a failure even more complete than that of the Canadian colonies. The Pamlico-Sound settlements showed so little military power that they were incapable of protecting themselves against the savages of the country, and without the help of Virginia they would have been annihilated. The French-Canadian colonists have always showed this incapacity to act for themselves, which cannot be attributed to physical conditions. As compared with the New-England colonists, with whom they came most in contact, they represented a colonizing scheme based on trading-posts; while their neighbors established and fought for homes in the English sense. The struggle for existence was in the English settler met with a vigor which grew out of political and religious convictions; in the Frenchman it was endured for lucrative trade. Anything higher was left to the missionary, who, while he led the pioneer life, failed in turn to develop it.