ere a brave and warlike people, trained to endure hardship, while
the English colonists were undisciplined, ignorant of war, and cowardly.
The link between them and the motherland, said these observers, could
be easily broken, for the colonies were longing to be free. There is no
doubt that France could put into the field armies vastly greater than
those of England. Had the French been able to cross the Channel,
march on London and destroy English power at its root, the story of
civilization in a great part of North America might well have been
different, and we should perhaps find now on the banks of the Hudson
what we find on the banks of the St. Lawrence--villages dominated
by great churches and convents, with inhabitants Catholic to a man,
speaking the language and preserving the traditions of France. The strip
of inviolate sea between Calais and Dover made impossible, however, an
assault on London. Sea power kept secure not only England but English
effort in America and in the end defeated France.

England had defenses other than her great strength on the sea. In spite
of the docility towards France shown by the English King, Charles II,
himself half French in blood and at heart devoted to the triumph of the
Catholic faith, the English people would tolerate no policies likely
to make England subservient to France. This was forbidden by age-long
tradition. The struggle had become one of religion as well as of race.
A fight for a century and a half with the Roman Catholic Church had
made England sternly, fanatically Protestant. In their suspicion of
the system which France accepted, Englishmen had sent a king to the
scaffold, had overthrown the monarchy, and had created a military
republic. This republic, indeed, had fallen, but the distrust of the
aims of the Roman Catholic Church remained intense and burst into
passionate fury the moment an understanding of the aims of France gained
currency.

There are indeed few passages in English history less creditable than
the panic fear of Roman Catholic plots which swept the country in
the days when Frontenac at Quebec was working to destroy English and
Protestant influence in America. In 1678, Titus Oates, a clergyman of
the Church of England who had turned Roman Catholic, declared that,
while in the secrets of his new church, he had found on foot a plot to
restore Roman Catholic dominance in England by means of the murder of
Charles II and of any other crimes necessary f