ands not really hers. If
she makes immediate restitution, the King of France, generous and kind,
will forego some of his rights and allow England to retain a strip some
fifty miles wide extending from Maine to Florida. France has the right
to the whole of the interior. In the mind of the reverend memorialist,
no doubt, there was the conviction that England would soon lose the
meager strip, fifty miles wide, which France might yield.

These dreams of power had a certain substance. It seems to us now that,
from the first, the French were dreaming of the impossible. We know
what has happened, and after the event it is an easy task to measure
political forces. The ambitions of France were not, however, empty
fancies. More than once she has seemed on the point of mastering
the nations of the West. Just before the year 1690 she had a great
opportunity. In England, in 1660, the fall of the system created by
Oliver Cromwell brought back to the English throne the House of Stuart,
for centuries the ally and usually the pupil of France. Stuart kings
of Scotland, allied with France, had fought the Tudor kings of England.
Stuarts in misfortune had been the pensioners of France. Charles II, a
Stuart, alien in religion to the convictions of his people, looked to
Catholic France to give him security on his throne. Before the first
half of the reign of Louis XIV had ended, it was the boast of the French
that the King of England was vassal to their King, that the states of
continental Europe had become mere pawns in the game of their Grand
Monarch, and that France could be master of as much of the world as
was really worth mastering. In 1679 the Canadian Intendant, Duchesneau,
writing from Quebec to complain of the despotic conduct of the Governor,
Frontenac, paid a tribute to "the King our master, of whom the whole
world stands in awe, who has just given law to all Europe."

To men thus obsessed by the greatness of their own ruler it seemed no
impossible task to overthrow a few English colonies in America of whose
King their own was the patron and the paymaster. The world of high
politics has never been conspicuous for its knowledge of human nature. A
strong blow from a strong arm would, it was believed both at Versailles
and Quebec, shatter forever a weak rival and give France the prize of
North America. Officers in Canada talked loftily of the ease with which
France might master all the English colonies. The Canadians, it was
said, w