ow rents, so long as merchants of standing in London or
New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had
ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it
seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce
the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments
for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide
at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when
peace with France was the settled policy of England.

Unhappily for this policy of _quieta non movere_, peace with France came
to an end after thirty years. And if since the Peace of Utrecht the
English colonies had grown rich and populous, the French had
strengthened their hold on all the strategic points of the interior from
Quebec to New Orleans. The province of Louisiana, founded in 1699 by
D'Iberville to forestall the English in occupying the mouth of the
Mississippi, contained a population of more than ten thousand white
settlers in 1745. The governor maintained friendly relations with the
Choctaw Indians, and endeavored to alienate the Cherokees and the Creeks
from the English alliance, and so to divert the rich peltry trade of the
Southwest from Fort Moore and Charleston to New Orleans. Attached to
Louisiana for administrative purposes were the small but thriving French
settlements on the Mississippi, between the Illinois and the Ohio
Rivers, centering about Forts Chartres, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia. Between
Louisiana and Canada all the connecting waterways, save alone the upper
Ohio, were guarded by military establishments and trading posts--on
Green Bay, on the Wabash and Miami Rivers, at the southern end of Lake
Michigan, at Detroit and Niagara. By discovery and occupation, the
French claimed all the inland country; denied the right of Englishmen to
settle or trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case
of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to
Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble
virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be
cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception.

The possession of this hinterland was now, toward the middle of the
century, become the vital issue; for the claims of France could not stay
the populous English colonies from pushing their frontier across the
mountains, or prevent skillful English traders from undermi