continent. King
William's war, declared in 1689, was therefore certain to rage in
America as well as in Europe.

[Illustration: Signature of D'Iberville.]

One sees by a glance at the map what advantage France had in this
struggle. It possessed the best fishing grounds and fur-producing
districts, and fish and furs were at first the only exports of value
from the north of America. The French, too, held all the water-ways to
the heart of the continent. Coming up Lake Champlain they could threaten
New York and New England from the rear. The colonies farther south they
shut in almost as straitly, French bullets whistling about any
Englishman's ears the instant he appeared beyond the mountains.

In other respects England had the advantage. In population English
America had become as superior as French America was territorially,
having 1,116,000 white inhabitants in 1750, to about 80,000 French. The
English colonies were also more convenient to the mother-country, and
the better situated for commerce both coastwise and across the ocean.
Among the English, temper for mere speculation and adventure decayed
very early, giving way to the conviction that successful planting
depended wholly upon persistent, energetic toil.

A piece of fortune more important yet was their relatively free
religious and political system. Toleration in religion was large.
Self-government was nearly complete internally, and indeed externally,
till the navigation acts. Canada, on the other hand, was oppressed by a
feudal constitution in the state, settlers being denied the fee simple
of their lands, and by Jesuits in Church. "New France could not grow,"
says Parkman, "with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but
such as pleased him. In making Canada a citadel of the state religion,
the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a
transatlantic empire." Thus the Huguenots, France's best emigrants to
America, did not come to New France, but to New England and the other
Protestant colonies.

[Illustration: The Attack on Schenectady.]

The Indian hostilities which heralded King William's War began August
13, 1688. Frontenac prepared to capture Albany and even Manhattan. He
did not accomplish so much; but on the night of February 8, 1689-90, his
force of ninety Iroquois and over a hundred Frenchmen fell upon
Schenectady, killed sixty, and captured eighty or ninety more. Only a
corporal's guard escaped to Albany with the sad news.