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Already New France had taken on a life and colour of its own. Governors and merchants and soldiers might come and go, but the ways of the colony were little changed. The striking and significant feature of these later years is the cessation of contact with France through immigration. The outburst of colonizing energy under Colbert proved brief. Louis XIV and Louis XV were seeking glory on European battle-fields, and could spare no men for the wilderness. Daring projects of American empire were staked out, but the men needed to hold and develop the vast arc from Montreal to New Orleans did not come. In the seventy years up to 1680 the colony had received at most three thousand immigrants from France; in the eighty years that followed, an incredibly small number came—a number which a distinguished authority, M. Benjamin Sulte, has put as low as one thousand all told. Through all this period France had more than twice the population of the British Isles, but did not send one settler to the New World for the twenty that Britain and Ireland urged and forced to go. In forty years half the Presbyterian population of Ulster sought refuge in the American colonies from British industrial and religious oppression; German, Dutch, Swiss settlers poured in during the eighteenth century by tens of thousands. The numbers of Ulstermen and of Germans coming to the English colonies in a single year exceeded the number of French settlers who crossed the Atlantic in the century and a half from the beginning to the end of the French régime. Of the four or five hundred thousand Huguenots exiled from France more came to the English colonies than Catholic France could spare for her own New-World plantations, and the names of Bowdoin, Faneuil, Revere, Bayard, Jay, Maury, Marion, and many another bear witness of their quality. For all the rapid multiplying of the original stock in New France, it continued to be outnumbered by the English colonies twenty to one.