It would be tedious to the reader to give further autobiographical notes. Yet the importance of these Montreal missionaries for the colonization of New France and the civilization of the Indians justifies the space we have allotted.
Parkman in his "Jesuits," pages 318-320, sums up the success of their missions thus:
"When we look for the results of those missions we soon become aware that the influence of the French and the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes.
"In the wars of the next century we do not find those examples of diabolical atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive, it is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil. * * * In this softening of manner, such as it was, and in the obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed savages gathered at stationary missions in Canada, we find after a century had elapsed all the results of the heroic toil of the Jesuits. The missions had failed because the Indians had ceased to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the hopes of the early Canadian fathers, nearly all were virtually extinct. The missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a falling foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and untractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher race, or the servile pliancy of a lower one, would each in its way have preserved them; as it was, their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however Protestants may carp at it, it was the only form of Christianity likely to take root in their crude and barbarous nature."
The following appreciation of the early Jesuits, taken from "The Dominion of Canada--The Brave Days of Old," by a Protestant writer, Professor Grant, of Kingston, may be of interest as coming from a later day pen: