uthority. See Alvord's "Mississippi Valley in British Politics," vol.
I, pp. 203-4.

It does not follow that the King and his advisers intended that the
territory should be kept forever intact as a forest preserve. They seem
to have contemplated that, from time to time, cessions would be secured
from the Indians and tracts would be opened for settlement. But every
move was to be made in accordance with plans formulated or authorized in
England. The restrictive policy won by no means universal assent in
the mother country. The Whigs generally opposed it, and Burke thundered
against it as "an attempt to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth
which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men."

In America there was a disposition to take the proclamation lightly as
being a mere sop to the Indians. But wherever it was regarded seriously,
it was hotly resented. After passing through an arduous war, the
colonists were ready to enter upon a new expansive era. The western
territories were theirs by charter, by settlement, and by conquest.
The Indian population, they believed, belonged to the unprogressive and
unproductive peoples of the earth. Every acre of fertile soil in America
called to the thrifty agriculturist; every westward flowing river
invited to trade and settlement as well, therefore, seek to keep
back the ocean with a broom as to stop by mere decree the tide of
homeseekers. Some of the colonies made honest attempts to compel the
removal of settlers from the reserved lands beyond their borders, and
Pennsylvania went so far as to decree the death penalty for all who
should refuse to remove. But the law was never enforced.

The news of the cession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi to the
English brought consternation to the two or three thousand French
people living in the settlements of the Kaskaskia, Illinois, and Wabash
regions. The transfer of the western bank to Spain did not become known
promptly, and for months the habitants supposed that by taking up their
abode on the opposite side of the stream they would continue under their
own flag. Many of them crossed the Mississippi to find new abodes even
after it was announced that the land had passed to Spain.

From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the Wabash,
and the Illinois had remained, in French hands, mere sprawling
villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have contained in its
most flourishing days two tho