thought of it, and that called out explosions of volcanic wrath from the first Napoleon.

Other territorial changes deeply affecting the course of history were made at the close of the Seven Years' War. Spain had taken part in the contest as an ally of France. England had captured Havana, in the island of Cuba, the very key to the Gulf of Mexico. To regain that, Spain surrendered Florida to England, and then received as a compensation from France all of her possessions on the continent of North America that did not pass to England. The grand result of these changes was that England and Spain now divided North America, the Mississippi River being the only definite boundary between them.

We must not allow our admiration of what the French had done in the West to blind us to the fact that the British cause was the cause of the Northwest and of America. Put in the broadest way, the question was, whether French or English ideas and tendencies should have sway in North America. Montcalm and Wolfe were both gallant soldiers and able commanders; both true patriots and chivalrous gentlemen; but they stood on the Heights of Abraham that September day for very different things: Montcalm for the old régime, Wolfe for the House of Commons; Montcalm for the alliance of king and priest, Wolfe for habeas corpus and free inquiry; Montcalm for the past, Wolfe for the future; Montcalm for Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour, Wolfe for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It was his clear perception of this point that led Mr. John Fiske to say: "The triumph of Wolfe marks the greatest turning-point as yet discoverable in modern history."

That the war was a war of civilizations becomes perfectly clear when we consider the temper, culture, and aims of the two classes of colonists. The history of French America is far more picturesque and brilliant than the history of British America in the period 1608-1754. But the English were doing work far more solid, valuable, and permanent than

1 American Political Ideas, 56.

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.

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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.