nce of
a people against their will. Upper Canada at that time consisted of less
than 100,000 inhabitants; yet, with the extra aid of only a few hundred
English soldiers, she repelled for three years the forces of the United
States--more than ten times their number, and separated only by a river.

Mr. J.M. Ludlow, in his brief but comprehensive "History of the War of
American Independence, 1775-1783," Chapter vii., well states _the folly
of England in endeavouring to conquer by arms the opinions_ of three
millions of people, and the impossibility of the American colonists
achieving their independence without the aid of men and money, and ships
from France, to which, in connection with Spain and Holland, the
Americans are actually indebted for their independence, and not merely
to their own sole strength and prowess, as American writers so
universally boast. Mr. Ludlow observes:

"At a time when steam had not yet baffled the winds, to dream of
conquering by force of arms, on the other side of the Atlantic, a people
of the English race, numbering between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000, with
something like 1,200 miles of seaboard, was surely an act of enormous
folly. We have seen in our own days the difficulties experienced by the
far more powerful and populous Northern States in quelling the secession
of the Southern, when between the two there was no other frontier than
at most a river, very often a mere ideal line, and when armies could be
raised by 100,000 men at a time. England attempted a far more difficult
task, with forces which, till 1781, never exceeded 35,000 men, and never
afterwards exceeded 42,075, including 'Provincials,' _i.e._, American
Loyalists." (But England, repeatedly on the verge of success, failed
from the incapacity and inactivity of the English generals.)

"Yet it is impossible to doubt that not once only, but repeatedly during
the course of the struggle, England was on the verge of triumph. The
American armies were perpetually melting away before the
enemy--directly, through the practice of short enlistments; indirectly,
through desertions. These desertions, if they might be often palliated
by the straits to which the men were reduced through arrears of pay and
want of supplies, arose in other cases, as after the retreat from New
York, from sheer loss of heart in the cause. The main army, under
Washington, was seldom even equal in numbers to that opposed to him. In
the winter of 1776-77, when his troop