ggested. The vast American back country, with its inviting
rivers and lakes, its shaded hills, and its sunny prairies, became
English territory. The English people had, however, only the vaguest
notion of the extent, appearance, and resources of their new possession.
Even the officials who drew the treaty were as ignorant of the country
as of middle Africa. Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known
English writer had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books
of Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small circle.
The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated interest in the
new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio became household words,
and enterprising publishers put out not only translations of the French
writers but compilations by Englishmen designed, in true journalistic
fashion, to meet the demands of the hour for information.

These publications displayed amazing misconceptions of the lands
described. They neither estimated aright the number and strength of the
French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western country was
of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman of the day, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, an ardent defender of the treaty of 1763, wrote that the
large tracts of America added by the war to the British dominions were
"only the barren parts of the continent, the refuse of the earlier
adventurers, which the French, who came last, had taken only as
better than nothing." As late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long
Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not
settle the western territory "for ages," and that the region must be
given up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as
unstable as the Scythians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these
distant critics can be forgiven when one recalls that Franklin himself,
while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western valleys teeming with
a thriving population, supposed that the dream would not be realized for
"some centuries." None of these observers dreamt that the territories
transferred in 1763 would have within seventy-five years a population
almost equal to that of Great Britain.

The ink with which the Treaty of Paris was signed was hardly dry before
the King and his ministers were confronted with the task of providing
government for the new possessions and of solving problems of land
tenure and trade. Still more imperative were measures to conciliate