EARLY COMMERCIAL POLICY OF FRANCE 79

readers some slight degree of aid toward substituting clear and well-founded conclusions for the complacent commonplaces that are so often repeated about the lack of national aptitudes for that kind of enterprise. It may also serve to bring out and accentuate the wide contrasts of principle and practice exhibited by the annals of French and English adventure beyond sea. The history of French colonization is ordinarily divided, we are told, into three periods: the period of the great discoveries, which is carried up to the death of Henry IV in 1609; the era of grand colonial expan- sion in the seventeenth century; and the period of decline during the hundred years that intervene be- tween the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 and the end of the great French wars in 1815. We have seen that the rivalry among the maritime mations began in earnest at the end of the sixteenth century, when the splendid achievements and conquests of Spain and Portugal had fired the imagination of the whole Western world. The spreading curiosity in France about outlandish peoples, distant voyages, and the fabulous wealth of Asia is illustrated by the writings of that age, and by constant allusions to the subject in such authors as Rebelais and Montaigne. Nevertheless, although at the opening of the seven- teenth century commercial and colonizing projects had already been entertained by that active and far-sighted ruler Henry IV, who projected a French East India Company, it was in England and Holland, not in France, that the first important step was taken by