e names of Haverhill and Deerfield
and Schenectady memorable in American history, and when, in desperate
campaigns against the Canadian strongholds, the colonists vainly sought
to protect themselves from the savages by attacking the centers from
which the murderous forays were directed. But each successive treaty of
peace between England and France confirmed and reconfirmed the French
claims to the main part of her American domain. The advances of French
missions and settlements continued southward and westward, in spite of
jealousy in European cabinets as the imposing magnitude of the plans of
French empire became more distinctly disclosed, and in spite of the
struggles of the English colonies both North and South. When, on the 4th
of July, 1754, Colonel George Washington surrendered Fort Necessity,
near the fork of the Ohio, to the French, "in the whole valley of the
Mississippi, to its headsprings in the Alleghanies, no standard floated
but that of France."[22:1]

There seemed little reason to doubt that the French empire in America,
which for a century and a half had gone on expanding and strengthening,
would continue to expand and strengthen for centuries to come. Sudden as
lightning, in August, 1756, the Seven Years' War broke out on the other
side of the globe. The treaty with which it ended, in February, 1763,
transferred to Great Britain, together with the Spanish territory of
Florida, all the French possessions in America, from the Arctic Ocean to
the Gulf of Mexico. "As a dream when one awaketh," the magnificent
vision of empire, spiritual and secular, which for so many generations
had occupied the imagination of French statesmen and churchmen, was
rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant
talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of
toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager
and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there
remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and
the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to
the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British
government, may reasonably be regarded as an indication of what France
would have done for the continent in general. But within the present
domain of the United States the entire results of a century and a half
of French Catholic colonization and evangelization may be summed up as
follows