their northern neighbors. The French took to the lakes, rivers, and forests; they cultivated the Indians; their explorers were intent on discovery, their traders on furs, their missionaries on souls. The English did not either take to the woods or cultivate the Indians; they loved agriculture and trade, State and Church, and so clung to their fields, shops, politics, and churches. As a result, while Canada languished, thirteen English states grew up on the Atlantic Plain modelled on the Saxon pattern, and became populous, rich, and strong. At the beginning of the war there were eighty thousand white inhabitants in New France, one million one hundred and sixty thousand in the British colonies. The disparity of wealth was equally striking. In 1754 there was more real civilization-more seeds of things-in the town of Boston than in all New France. In time, these compact and vigorous British colonies offered effective resistance to Great Britain. It is plain that, had they spread themselves out over half a continent, hunted beaver, and trafficked with the Indians, after the manner of the French, Independence would have been postponed many years, and possibly forever. We owe a vast debt to the inherited character of those Englishmen who came to America in the first half of the seventeenth century, and no small debt to the Appalachian mountain-wall that confined them to the narrow Atlantic slope until, by reason of compression and growth, they were gotten ready, first to enter the West in force, and then to extort their independence from England.

But the French and Indian War borrows its great significance from another struggle. It was but the prelude to a grander contest. "With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham," writes Mr. Green, "began the history of the United States." James Wolfe's Highlanders and grenadiers at Quebec, and not the embattled farmers at Lexington, won the first victory of the American Revolution.

1

1 History of the English People, iv., 193, 194.

VI.

THE THIRTEEN COLONIES AS CONSTITUTED BY THE ROYAL CHARTERS.—(I.)

To encourage American plantations, the British Crown granted from time to time those charters that constitute the first chapter of American Jurisprudence. In bounding the grants of land that those charters conveyed, the Crown was governed neither by a knowledge of American geography nor by a legal principle. The most imaginative man alive could not bound his estates in Spain with greater disregard of Spanish geography and Spanish law. The grants overlapped and conflicted with one another in a way that was then most troublesome to colonists and proprietors, and that is now most exasperating to students of history. Five causes will explain these conflictions: (1) Gross ignorance of American geography; (2) the great size of the early grants; (3) the surrender or vacation of charters; (4) the influence of favorites praying for grants to themselves or their friends; (5) the royal prerogative. I shall transcribe the boundary descriptions found in the principal charters, and show how the Thirteen Colonies took shape under them.'

The charter given to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 granted

1 The texts found in Poore's Charters and Constitutions of the United States will be followed. In preparing this chapter and the next one the author has received great assistance from "Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey, No. 13: Boundaries of the United States and of the Several States and Territories, with an Historical Sketch of the Territorial Changes," by Henry Gannett, Chief Geographer.

to that "trusty and well-beloved servant" of Queen Elizabeth, his heirs and assigns forever

"free libertie and licence from time to time, and at all times foreuer hereafter, to discouer, search, finde out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, counteries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince nor inhabited by Christian People, as to him, his heires and assignes, and to euery or any of them, shall seeme good, and the same to haue, holde, occupie, and enjoy to him, his heires and assignes, foreuer, with all prerogatiues, commodities, jurisdictions, royalties, priuileges, franchises, and preheminences, thereto or thereabouts both by sea and land, whatsoeuer we by our letters patents may graunt, and as we or any of our noble progenitors haue heretofore graunted to any person or persons, bodies politique or corporate."

The charter further forbade any person or persons whatsoever inhabiting or attempting to inhabit the same countries coming within two hundred leagues of the place or places where Raleigh, his heirs and assigns, or his or their associates in any company, should, within six years ensuing, make their dwellings or abidings, without his or their consent; and it authorized and instructed him or them to encounter and expulse, to repel and resist, as well by sea as by land, all who should attempt to do so. Raleigh's unsuccessful attempts to plant under this charter are among the chivalrous and pathetic stories of early American adventure.

While it was well understood that Raleigh was to plant in the queen's American possessions, the name America does not occur in the document. He was not to go into lands actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhabited by Christian people, but that was the only limitation. It is plain that her dominions on this continent lay before Elizabeth's eyes an undifferentiated mass without assigned metes and bounds, and that other grants or colonies were not then contemplated. As those dominions then had no distinctive