d of the commercial advantages which were
to have been its recompense.

After 1713 there was a comparatively long interval of peace between
Britain and France, but it was occupied by an acute commercial rivalry,
in which, on the whole, the French seemed to be getting the upper hand.
Their sugar islands in the West Indies were more productive than the
British; their traders were rapidly increasing their hold over the
central plain of North America, to the alarm of the British colonists;
their intrigues kept alive a perpetual unrest in the recently conquered
province of Acadia; and away in India, under the spirited direction of
Francois Dupleix, their East India Company became a more formidable
competitor for the Indian trade than it had hitherto been. Hence the
imperial problem presented itself to the statesmen of that generation
as a problem of power rather than as a problem of organisation; and the
intense rivalry with France dwarfed and obscured the need for a
reconsideration of colonial relations. At length this rivalry flamed
out into two wars. The first of these was fought, on both sides, in a
strangely half-hearted and lackadaisical way. But in the second (the
Seven Years' War, 1756-63) the British cause, after two years of
disaster, fell under the confident and daring leadership of Pitt, which
brought a series of unexampled successes. The French flag was almost
swept from the seas. The French settlements in Canada were overrun and
conquered. With the fall of Quebec it was determined that the system of
self-government, and not that of autocracy, should control the
destinies of the North American continent; and Britain emerged in 1763
the supreme colonial power of the world. The problem of power had been
settled in her favour; but the problem of organisation remained
unsolved. It emerged in an acute and menacing form as soon as the war
was over.

During the course of these two wars, and in the interval between them,
an extraordinary series of events had opened a new scene for the
rivalry of the two great imperial powers, and a new world began to be
exposed to the influence of the political ideas of Europe. The vast and
populous land of India, where the Europeans had hitherto been content
to play the part of modest traders, under the protection and control of
great native rulers, had suddenly been displayed as a field for the
imperial ambitions of the European peoples. Ever since the first
appearance of the Dutch,