English captain appearing not to understand, the question was
repeated in French. 'Peace! peace!' shouted the English. Almost at the
same moment the _Dunkerque_ poured in a broadside, riddling the _Alcide_
with balls." The two French ships were taken; and a few days afterwards,
three hundred merchant vessels, peaceably pursuing their course, were
seized by the English navy. The loss was immense, as well as the
disgrace. France at last decided upon declaring war, which had already
been commenced in fact for more than two years.

It was regretfully, and as if compelled by a remnant of national honor,
that Louis XV. had just adopted the resolution of defending his colonies;
he had, and the nation had as well, the feeling that the French were
hopelessly weak at sea. "What use to us will be hosts of troops and
plenty of money," wrote the advocate Barbier, "if we have only to fight
the English at sea? They will take all our ships one after another, they
will seize all our settlements in America, and will get all the trade.
We must hope for some division amongst the English nation itself, for the
king personally does not desire war."

The English nation was not divided. The ministers and the Parliament, as
well as the American colonies, were for war. "There is no hope of repose
for our thirteen colonies, as long as the French are masters of Canada,"
said Benjamin Franklin, on his arrival in London in 1754. He was already
laboring, without knowing it, at that great work of American independence
which was to be his glory and that of his generation; the common efforts
and the common interest of the thirteen American colonies in the war
against France were the first step towards that great coalition which
founded the United States of America.

The union with the mother-country was as yet close and potent: at the
instigation of Mr. Fox, soon afterwards Lord Holland, and at the time
Prime Minister of England, Parliament voted twenty-five millions for the
American war. The bounty given to the soldiers and marines who enlisted
was doubled by private subscription; fifteen thousand men were thus
raised to invade the French colonies.

Canada and Louisiana together did not number eighty thousand inhabitants,
whilst the population of the English colonies already amounted to twelve
hundred thousand souls; to the twenty-eight hundred regular troops sent
from France, the Canadian militia added about four thousand men, less
exper