Incessant dynastic wars with near neighbors, the final throes of the long struggle between the crown and the great vassals, and finally the religious wars that culminated in the awful slaughter of St.Bartholomew's, and ended at the close of the century with the politic conversion and the coronation of Henry IV .-- these were among the causes that had held back the great nation from distant undertakings.

But thoughts of great things to be achieved in the New World had never for long at a time been absent from the minds of Frenchmen.

The annual visits of the Breton fishing-fleets to the banks of Newfoundland kept in mind such rights of discovery as were alleged by France, and kept attention fixed in the direction of the great gulf and river of St.Lawrence.Long before the middle of the sixteenth century Jacques Cartier had explored the St.Lawrence beyond the commanding position which he named Montreal, and a royal commission had issued, under which he was to undertake an enterprise of "discovery, settlement, and the conversion of the Indians." But it was not till the year 1608 that the first permanent French settlement was effected.

With the _coup d'oeil_ of a general or the foresight of a prophet, Champlain, the illustrious first founder of French empire in America, in 1608 fixed the starting-point of it at the natural fortress of Quebec.
How early the great project had begun to take shape in the leading minds of the nation it may not be easy to determine.

It was only after the adventurous explorations of the French pioneers, traders, and friars--men of like boundless enthusiasm and courage--had been crowned by the achievement of La Salle, who first of men traversed the two great waterways of the continent from the Gulf of St.Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, that the amazing possibilities of it were fully revealed.