COLONIZATION OF THE NEW WORLD.

21

There was one reason during the eighteenth century which opposed France to England which had not existed in the centuries before. It was, to a certain extent, connected with that cause which Franklin came to Paris to represent. The colonial supremacy of the world had, for some time, been at stake, and the two foremost nations of Europe had fought the question through.

The Discovery of America had given to Spain and Portugal an advantage over the other nations of Europe which those two nations were not slow to improve. And that these two Christian powers should not come into hostile contact, the world was divided between them by the beneficent Holy Father. Through the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal were the foremost commercial powers in Europe. Spain drew exhaustless revenues from Peru, from Mexico, and from the West Indies, while the East Indies and Brazil enriched her smaller co-partner in the. ownership of God's earth. England possessed not a single town outside her own shores, save Calais, and France was far too much distracted by quarrels of Catholic and Huguenot within her borders to turn her attention to other worlds. But, by the beginning of the eighteenth century all this was changed. Spain and Portugal still held the Pope's Bull. But the other powers of Europe had begun to participate in the great work of colonization. history of the settlements of England in 1700 is familiar to everybody. The twelve colonies in America, together with some in the West India Islands, showed her power in the New World, while the Carnatic and the Ganges began to be dotted with the trading-posts whereby she had asserted her supremacy over an older civilization. And France, some years before England, had set her foothold permanently upon the continent of America. The settlers of the little town of Port Royal in Acadia were

The

whiling away the winter months by mimic ceremonies and light hearted shows some years before Jamestown was in being. Soon the Jesuits were infected with enthusiasm for American conquests. Their missions were pushed out to Lake Huron, and their hardy missionaries were to be seen even among the Iroquois in New York and the Ottawas at Machillimakinac. The next step was the discovery of the Mississippi, which set a stream of French fur traders and coureurs des bois into the broad West of America to follow the lead of the brilliant and indomitable La Salle. And, just before the eighteenth century dawned, Bienville laid out the old French town at New Orleans. France claimed all west of the Mississippi, and all north and west of the Ohio and the Alleghanies. It was the lion's share of America. In 1700, America was, on the map, far more French than English. The latter had twelve colonies cooped in by the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic, restrained at the Kennebec by the French and Indians, and at the Altamaha by the Spanish settlements of Florida. But France had open to her the whole basin of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi, - stretching away to the Rocky Mountains, with a probable access to the Pacific, and held the keys to this valley at Quebec and New Orleans.

In the West Indies, too, French colonization was becoming active. Trade with the islands flourished enormously. The French trade began to drive the English and Spanish from the market. It is said that the French half of San Domingo (infinitely more prosperous than the Spanish half) was by itself alone equal in value to all the English West Indies. Martinique and Guadeloupe were overflowing with all sorts of wealth. In the East Indies, also, France was at work. In that part of the world she was for some years the chief commercial power; the Portuguese

THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.

23

and the Dutch were declining, the English were still weak. In the Isle of France was La Bourdonnais. In the Carnatic was Dupleix. These two men were doing great things for France in India, and could their magnificent schemes have come to a successful end, India might to-day be French rather than English.

"A splendid present, an alarming future," says Martin, of the situation. The two hereditary enemies shared the commercial supremacy of the world, the Dutch being hardly and grudgingly admitted to a part. But neither France nor England was of the temper to allow the other to advance at a dangerous rate. The wars of the eighteenth century, as far as we can note their results to-day, were colonial wars, undertaken for colonial supremacy, and having that supremacy for their reward. When Franklin appeared at Paris, France had fought her rival through four ruinous wars, and the terms upon which the combatants had last sheathed their swords, had not been such that France, the beaten party, felt content to lie quiet.

The Peace of Paris in 1763 had ended the most disastrous of these struggles with her hereditary foe in which she had for many a century been engaged. Thanks to complications following certain disagreements between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa, thanks also to the whims of the Pompadour and the ambitions of her favorites, the rulers of Europe let slip the dogs of war to range for seven long years up and down the length of this world and over the breadth of two hemispheres. The years between 1756 and 1763 were marked by some of the most doleful contests by which the world has ever been vexed. In Europe Frederick himself matched his military stratagem and his never-failing resolution against the overwhelming numbers of Russia and Austria, while

England and Hanover engaged successfully the marshals of Louis XV. In America, over the great part of the Continent, from the Ohio to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Frenchmen and Indian were arrayed against British 1 regulars, provincials, and the Iroquois; and, following on Louisburg, Ticonderoga, Duquesne, and Quebec stand as reminders of that struggle which for years sounded on the

ears of our forefathers. And not only on our own far-away land did European quarrels bring disaster and suffering. Even in the Antipodes the schemes of the Prussian King and the intrigues of the Parisian Court fanned into sudden flame the innumerable smoulderings of intrigue and plotting by French or English in the Carnatic. They offered opportunity, not in vain, in which Clive made for himself an undying name, and wealth which seemed unending, over the bodies of La Bourdonnais and Dupleix. At the same time he laid for England the foundations of a government over the semi-barbaric tribes of Hindostan. On the shores of Africa as well, and in the West Indies, the English and French arms sought each other. Spain, too, became involved in the general struggle. The far

FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA.

1 The use of this word, universal in the American histories of the Revolution, is ridiculed sometimes in England as a provincialism. But it was universal in the English literature of the time. It came in with the union with Scotland, and the Scotch writers were numerous enough and efficient enough to keep it in constant demand whenever both parts of the kingdom were spoken of. Even Dr. Johnson constantly speaks of Britain. With the passage of a generation the larger part of the island gained its old name in English literature.

THE TREATY OF PARIS.

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reaching schemes of Pitt struck at her Indian possessions East and West, and the loss of the Havana and of the Philippines was the price she might have paid for declaring war against the chief maritime power of Europe. Not only on land, but at sea as well, did these great naval powers array their strength against each other, and match their fleets, Titanic three-deckers and ponderous frigates, in battles which lasted till little was left but the floating hulks for victor or vanquished. And it was now, for the first time, after the many fierce encounters of this colonial war, that Great Britain rose, acknowledged the greatest maritime power of the world.

Everywhere had France come forth from the struggle humbled, defeated, overwhelmed. Her armies were beaten, her navies shattered, her possessions overrun throughout the world. Quebec, Louisburg, Pondicherry, Plassey recall the reluctant steps by which she receded from her colonies in America, India, in Africa and the West Indies, — while not a few victories on land and sea caused her flag to vanish from the ocean, and her prestige on European battlefields to receive a crushing blow

The war had been one for colonial supremacy. France had been beaten, and it was in her colonial possessions that she principally suffered. In North America, where Champlain had discovered a field for the enthusiastic labors of the heroic Jesuits, where Frontenac had protected and strengthened New France and Montcalm had heroically defended her, France ceded the whole of her vast possessions, retaining for herself only two small islands, St. Pierre and Miquelon, on which to dry fish. England received Acadia, Cape Breton, the islands of the St. Lawrence, and all Canada. These were possessions absolutely necessary to her American empire, as will be seen by any one who notes how very small a part of the

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