sieur
Malbrouck est mort," a song of delight at a report that Marlborough was
dead. When in place of Marlborough leaders of the type of General Hill
were appointed to high command, France could not be finally beaten. The
Treaty of Utrecht was the outcome of war-weariness. It marks, however,
a double check to Louis XIV. He could not master Europe and he could
not master America. France now ceded to Britain her claim to Acadia,
Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay. She regarded this, however, as only a
temporary setback and was soon planning and plotting great designs far
surpassing the narrower vision of the English colonies.

It was with a wry face, however, that France yielded Acadia. To retain
it she offered to give up all rights in the Newfoundland fisheries, the
nursery of her marine. Britain would not yield Acadia, dreading chiefly
perhaps the wrath of New England which had conquered Port Royal.
Britain, however, compromised on the question of boundaries in a way so
dangerous that the long war settled finally no great issues in America.
She took Acadia "according to its ancient limits,"--but no one knew
these limits. They were to be defined by a joint commission of the two
nations which, after forty years, reached no agreement. The Island of
Cape Breton and the adjoining Ile St. Jean, now Prince Edward
Island, remained to France. Though Britain secured sovereignty over
Newfoundland, France retained extensive rights in the Newfoundland
fisheries. The treaty left unsettled the boundary between Canada and
the English colonies. While it yielded Hudson Bay to Britain, it settled
nothing as to frontiers in the wilderness which stretched beyond the
Great Lakes into the Far West and which had vast wealth in furs.

CHAPTER IV. Louisbourg And Boston

For thirty years England and France now remained at peace, and England
had many reasons for desiring peace to continue. Anne, the last of the
Stuart rulers, died in 1714. The new King, George I, Elector of Hanover,
was a German and a German unchangeable, for he was already fifty four,
with little knowledge of England and none of the English, and with
an undying love for the dear despotic ways easily followed in a small
German principality. He and his successor George II were thinking
eternally of German rather than of English problems, and with German
interests chiefly regarded it was well that England should make a friend
of France. It was well, too, that under a new dynasty, wit