Because of such outrages, the
French army was denied the honors of war usually conceded to a brave and
defeated foe. The French officers and men must not, Amherst insisted,
serve again during the war. Levis protested and begged Vaudreuil to be
allowed to go on fighting rather than accept the terms, but in vain. The
humiliation was rigorously imposed, and it was a sullen host which the
British took captive.
France had lost an Empire. It was nearly three years still before peace
was signed at Paris in 1763. To Britain France yielded everything
east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and to Spain she ceded
New Orleans and everything else to which she had any claim. The
fleurs-de-lis floated still over only two tiny fishing islands off
the Newfoundland shore. All the glowing plans of France's leaders--of
Richelieu, of Louis XIV, of Colbert, of Frontenac, of the heroic
missionaries of the Jesuit Order--seemed to have come to nothing.
The fall of France did much to drag down her rival. Already was America
restless under control from Europe. There was now no danger to the
English in America from the French peril which had made insecure the
borders of Massachusetts, of New York, of Pennsylvania, and Virginia,
and had brought widespread desolation and sorrow. With the removal of
the menace went the need of help and defenses for the colonies from the
motherland. The French belief that there was a natural antipathy between
the English of the Old World and the English of the New was, in reality,
based on the fact of a likeness so great that neither would accept
control or patronage from the other. Towards the Englishman who assumed
airs of superiority the antagonism of the colonists was always certain
to be acute. Open strife came when the assumption of superiority took
the form of levying taxes on the colonies without asking their leave.
In no remote way the fall of French Canada, by removing a near menace
to the English colonies, led to this new conflict and to the collapse
of that older British Empire which had sprung from the England of the
Stuarts.
When Montreal fell there were in the St. Lawrence many British ships
which had been used for troops and supplies. Before the end of September
the French soldiers and also the officials from France who desired to go
home were on board these ships bound for Europe. By the end of November
most of the exiles had reached home. Varying receptions awaited them.
Levis, who took b
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