opposition that might otherwise have warned even
George III. to pause ere it was too late.

[1765]

While the war thus indirectly led England to encroach upon the rights of
the colonies, it also did much to prepare the latter to resist such
encroachment. It had this effect mainly in two ways: by promoting union
among the colonies, and by giving to many of their citizens a good
training in the duties of camp, march, and battle-field.

The value to the colonists of their military experience in this war can
hardly be overestimated. If the outbreak of the Revolution had found the
Americans a generation of civilians, if the colonial cause had lacked
the privates who had seen hard service at Lake George and Louisburg, or
the officers, such as Washington, Gates, Montgomery, Stark, and Putnam,
who had learned to fight successfully against British regulars by
fighting with them, it is a question whether the uprising would not have
been stamped out, for a time at least, almost at its inception.
Especially at the beginning of such a war, when the first necessity is
to get a peaceful nation under arms as quickly as possible, a few
soldier-citizens are invaluable. They form the nucleus of the rising
army, and set the standard for military organization and discipline. In
fact, the French and Indian War would have repaid the colonies all it
cost even if its only result had been to give the youthful Washington
that schooling in arms which helped fit him to command the Continental
armies. Without the Washington of Fort Necessity and of Braddock's
defeat, we could in all likelihood never have had the Washington of
Trenton and Yorktown. Besides Washington, to say nothing of Gates, Gage,
and Mercer, also there, Dan Morgan, of Virginia, began to learn war in
the Braddock campaign.

[Illustration: Tree lined Pond covered with leaves.]
Bloody Pond, near Lake George, which is said to still contain the
bones of many of those who fell in the fight at Fort William Henry.

Again, the war prepared the colonists for the Revolution by revealing to
them their own rare fighting quality, and by showing that the dreaded
British regulars were not invincible. No foe would, at Saratoga or
Monmouth, see the backs of the men who had covered the redcoats' retreat
from the field of Braddock's death, scaled the abatis of Louisburg, or
brained Dieskau's regulars on the parapet of Fort William Henry.

But there was one thing even more necessary to the Re