glish colonies, therefore, had been
founded upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbours and
rivals. They were an expression of the commercial energy of the English
middle classes, while the French settlements were inhabited by people
who had crossed the ocean as servants of the king and who expected to
return to Paris at the first possible chance.

Politically, however, the position of the English colonies was far from
satisfactory. The French had discovered the mouth of the Saint Lawrence
in the sixteenth century. From the region of the Great Lakes they had
worked their way southward, had descended the Mississippi and had built
several fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century
of exploration, a line of sixty French forts cut off the English
settlements along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior.

The English land grants, made to the different colonial companies had
given them "all land from sea to sea." This sounded well on paper,
but in practice, British territory ended where the line of French
fortifications began. To break through this barrier was possible but it
took both men and money and caused a series of horrible border wars in
which both sides murdered their white neighbours, with the help of the
Indian tribes.

As long as the Stuarts had ruled England there had been no danger of
war with France. The Stuarts needed the Bourbons in their attempt to
establish an autocratic form of government and to break the power of
Parliament. But in 1689 the last of the Stuarts had disappeared from
British soil and Dutch William, the great enemy of Louis XIV succeeded
him. From that time on, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and
England fought for the possession of India and North America.

During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies invariably
beat the French. Cut off from her colonies, France lost most of her
possessions, and when peace was declared, the entire North American
continent had fallen into British hands and the great work of
exploration of Cartier, Champlain, La Salle, Marquette and a score of
others was lost to France.

Only a very small part of this vast domain was inhabited. From
Massachusetts in the north, where the Pilgrims (a sect of Puritans who
were very intolerant and who therefore had found no happiness either in
Anglican England or Calvinist Holland) had landed in the year 1620, to
the Carolinas and Virginia (the tobacco-raising provinces wh