Hence it is that the people of Germanic origin, from whom the English and Americans have alike sprung, make the best of colonizers, and are now rapidly extending themselves as emigrants and settlers in all parts of the habitable globe.
The French have never made any progress as colonizers, mainly because of their intense social instincts--the secret of their graces of manner,--and because they can never forget that they are Frenchmen.

[1815] It seemed at one time within the limits of probability that the French would occupy the greater part of the North American continent.

From Lower Canada their line of forts extended up the St.Lawrence, and from Fond du Lac on Lake Superior, along the River St.Croix, all down the Mississippi, to its mouth at New Orleans.

But the great, self-reliant, industrious "Niemec," from a fringe of settlements along the seacoast, silently extended westward, settling and planting themselves everywhere solidly upon the soil; and nearly all that now remains of the original French occupation of America, is the French colony of Acadia, in Lower Canada.
And even there we find one of the most striking illustrations of that intense sociability of the French which keeps them together, and prevents their spreading over and planting themselves firmly in a new country, as it is the instinct of the men of Teutonic race to do.

While, in Upper Canada, the colonists of English and Scotch descent penetrate the forest and the wilderness, each settler living, it may be, miles apart from his nearest neighbour, the Lower Canadians of French descent continue clustered together in villages, usually consisting of a line of houses on either side of the road, behind which extend their long strips of farm-land, divided and subdivided to an extreme tenuity.