re occupied in the topping-off.
The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand
native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,
some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration
consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that
brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from
making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of
any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall
into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support
the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the
coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion
of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted
view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first
instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of
legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day
proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,
the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an
Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then
predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.
They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the
continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy
formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the
Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close
harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province
of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and
foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did
not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with
other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
St. Lawrence to the Crown.

As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand
characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James
Wood of Winchester, afterward gover