lousy were still strong. Each colony had
thought of itself as a complete and isolated political body, in a way
which it is difficult for us, after a hundred years of national unity,
to conceive. Plainly a lifetime of peace would not have begotten the
same degree of consolidation among the colonies which the war, with its
common danger and common purpose, called into being in a half-dozen
years.

The war did yet another important service by removing a dangerous
neighbor of the colonies. So long as France, ambitious and warlike, kept
foot-hold in the New World, the colonies had to look to the
mother-country for protection. But this danger gone, England ceased to
be necessary to the safety of the embryo political communities, and her
sovereignty was therefore the more readily renounced. English statesmen
foresaw this danger before the Peace of Paris, and but for the
magnanimity of Pitt our western territory might after all have been left
in the hands of France.

And the cession of Canada, besides removing an enemy, helped to
transform that enemy into an active friend. Had France retained her
possessions in America, she would still have had an interest in
maintaining the colonial system, and it is doubtful if even her hatred
of England would have induced her to aid the rebellious colonies. But,
her dream of a great Western empire forever dispelled, she had much to
gain and nothing to lose by drawing sword for the American cause. The
British defeated the French at Quebec only to meet them again at
Yorktown.

One more result remains to be noted, without which what has preceded
would lose half its significance. By the Peace of Paris England
succeeded to all of France's possessions in America east of the
Mississippi; but the most valuable part of this great territory she won
only to hold in trust a few years for her colonial children. The
redcoats under Amherst and Wolfe, who thought they were fighting for
King George, were in reality winning an empire for the Young Republic.
It is not easy to feel the full significance of this. The colonies
might, indeed, have won independence even if France had retained her
grasp on the valley of the Mississippi; but so long as the new-born
nation was shut up to a narrow strip along the Atlantic coast, it would
have been a lion caged. The "conquest of Canada," says Green, "by ...
flinging open to their energies in the days to come the boundless plains
of the West, laid the foundation of t