French since the days of Champlain--the warm allies of
a people who fraternised naturally with them; and it would have been an
unhappy day for the English colonists had eighty or a hundred thousand
Canadians been able to arm and, under the skilful {227} generalship of
Montcalm, swoop down with their savage allies on the English colonial
settlements. But the French of Canada were never able, as a rule, to
do more than harass by sudden raids and skirmishes--by a system of
_petite guerre_, or petty warfare--the English of America, and at no
time in colonial history was the capture of Boston or of New York
actually attempted by a land force from Canada, though it was suggested
more than once. At the outbreak of the war the Mohawks were the only
Indian tribe on whom the English could place much dependence, and that
was largely owing to the energy and discretion of Sir William Johnson,
who had long lived in their country and gained not only their
confidence but even their affection. The tribes in the Ohio valley had
been won by the success of the French in driving out the Virginians,
while in the further west the Foxes and other communities who had been
unfriendly to the French had been beaten into submission--the Foxes in
fact almost destroyed--by the raids of the French and their Indian
allies. The great current of active thought and enterprise which
develops a nation was always with the English colonies, and though
large schemes of ambition stimulated the energies of the bold and
adventurous men to whom the destinies of France were entrusted from the
days of La Salle to those of Montcalm, their ability to found a new
empire in America under the lilies of France was ever hindered by the
slow development of the French settlements, by the incapacity of the
King and his ministers in France to grasp the importance of the
situation on this {228} continent, and by their refusal to carry out
the projects of men like La Galissonniere, who at once recognised the
consequences of such neglect and indifference, but found no one ready
to favour his scheme of establishing large settlements of French
peasantry in Canada and Louisiana. France, we see now, had her great
opportunity in America, and lost it forever at Quebec in 1759.

Before we proceed to the record of the events which led to the conquest
of Canada, it is necessary that we should briefly review the history of
the period which elapsed between the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle