to remodel and increase his cavalry,
and he afterwards owed to it much of his success. Nobody again
advised him to ride out of the way of danger. He was soon known to an
invariable victor, and Maria Theresa ended the war by surrendering the
contested province. Frederic concluded a treaty of alliance with
France, which was to last fifteen years, and did last until, in 1756,
Kaunitz effected the great change in the attitude of European Powers.
On the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty of emperors, the Bavarian
House of Wittelsbach claimed the succession; and the French, supported
by Frederic, traversed Germany and invaded Bohemia. Maria Theresa was
loyally defended by Hungary in both the Silesian wars, and maintained
her right, without recovering the country she had lost. She was
ineffectively supported by England against the superiority of French
arms in the Netherlands. That good understanding now came to an end.

The Seven Years' War, otherwise called the Third Silesian War, because
it finally settled the question whether Silesia should be Austrian or
Prussian, though it involved almost every European Power, was an
episode in a far larger controversy. French and English were at peace
in the old world, but a feud had broken out in the backwoods of the
new, where their strife was for the grandest prize ever disputed by
man, dominion over America from the Atlantic ultimately to the Golden
Gates of the Pacific, and for the future of the world. The French
were masters of the lake region and the St. Lawrence, and also of the
Mississippi basin. They claimed the intervening country by right of
discovery, and they began, in 1748, to establish an effective
occupation of the valley of the Ohio. The English might retain the
Atlantic fringe; the French would possess the hinterland from
Louisbourg to New Orleans. They planted a chain of posts, choosing
the place for them with superb intuition. One is now Detroit, another
Chicago. And under the inland slope of the Alleghanies, where the
waters fall towards the Gulf of Mexico, at the confluence of the
Monongahela with the Ohio, a French officer, Duquesne, built a fort,
the most important of all, which closed the interior to our colonies,
but which has undergone a significant change of name, for Fort
Duquesne is called after Pitt, and is the Birmingham of America.

This annexation of debatable land was an act of aggression to which
the colonists were not bound to submit.