ans, who
checkmated this move. With a wisdom almost prophetic, he foresaw that
if France helped the United States, and then demanded Canada as her
reward, the old border warfare would be renewed with tenfold more
terror. No longer would it be bushrover pitted against frontiersmen.
It would be France against Congress, and Washington refused to give the
aid of Congress to the scheme of France embroiling America in European
wars. The story of how Clark, the American, won the Mississippi forts
for Congress is not part of Canada's history, nor are the terrible
border raids of Butler and Brant, the Mohawk, who sided with the
English, and left the Wyoming valley south of the Iroquois Confederacy
a blackened wilderness, and the homes of a thousand settlers smoking
ruins. It is this last raid which gave the poet Campbell his theme in
"Gertrude of Wyoming." By the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783, England
acknowledged the independence of the United States, and Canada's area
was shorn of her fairest territory by one fell swath. Instead of the
Ohio being the southern boundary, the middle line of the Great Lakes
divided Canada from her southern neighbor. The River Ste. Croix was to
separate Maine from New Brunswick. The sole explanation of this loss
to Canada was that the American commissioners knew their business and
the value of the ceded territory, and the English commissioners did
not. It is one of the many conspicuous examples of what loyalty has
cost Canada. England is to give up the western posts to the United
States, from Miami to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Grand Portage.
In return the United States federal government is to recommend to the
States {311} Governments that all property confiscated from Royalists
during the war be restored.

[Illustration: GENERAL HALDIMAND]

General Haldimand, a Swiss who has served in the Seven Years' War,
succeeds Carleton as governor in 1778. The times are troublous. There
is still a party in favor of Congress. The great unrest, which ends in
the French Revolution, disturbs habitants' life. Then that provision
of the Quebec Act, by which legislative councilors were to be nominated
by the crown, works badly. Councilors, judges, crown attorneys, even
bailiffs are appointed by the colonial office of London, and find it
more to their interests to stay currying favor in London than to attend
to their duties in Canada. The country is cursed by the evil of absent
officeholders