the main question, and destruction
for the time of her sea power.

Such being the character of the coming wars, it is important to
realize the relative positions of the three great powers in those
quarters of the world, outside of Europe, where the strife was to
engage.

In North America, England now held the thirteen colonies, the original
United States, from Maine to Georgia. In these colonies was to be
found the highest development of that form of colonization peculiar to
England, bodies of free men essentially self-governing and
self-dependent, still enthusiastically loyal, and by occupation at
once agricultural, commercial, and sea-faring. In the character of
their country and its productions, in its long sea-coast and sheltered
harbors, and in their own selves, they had all the elements of sea
power, which had already received large development. On such a country
and such a people the royal navy and army were securely based in the
western hemisphere. The English colonists were intensely jealous of
the French and Canadians.

France held Canada and Louisiana, a name much more extensive in its
application then than now, and claimed the entire valley of the Ohio
and Mississippi, by right of prior discovery, and as a necessary link
between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico. There was as yet no
adequate occupation of this intermediate country, nor was the claim
admitted by England, whose colonists asserted the right to extend
indefinitely westward. The strength of the French position was in
Canada; the St. Lawrence gave them access to the heart of the country,
and though Newfoundland and Nova Scotia had been lost, in Cape Breton
Island they still held the key of the gulf and river. Canada had the
characteristics of the French colonial system planted in a climate
least suited to it. A government paternal, military, and monkish
discouraged the development of individual enterprise and of free
association for common ends. The colonists abandoned commerce and
agriculture, raising only food enough for immediate consumption, and
were given to arms and hunting. Their chief traffic was in furs. There
was so little mechanical art among them that they bought of the
English colonies part of the vessels for their interior navigation.
The chief element of strength was the military, arms-bearing character
of the population; each man was a soldier.

Besides the hostility inherited from the mother-countries, there was a
nec