nada at the
beginning of this war.

The thirteen American Colonies had, at that time, all told, of both
white and black, a population of about one million and a half of souls
(1,425,000.)[A] The French people of Canada numbered less than one
hundred thousand.[B]

[Footnote A: Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. 4, p. 127.]

[Footnote B: Encyclopedia Brittanica.]

The respective claims to the Central part of the North American
Continent by England and France were conflicting and irreconcilable. The
former, by right of discovery, claimed all the territory upon the
Atlantic coast from New Foundland to Florida, and by virtue of numerous
grants the right to all west of this to the Pacific Ocean. The latter,
by right of occupation and exploration, claimed Canada, a portion of New
England and New York, and the basins of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
together with all the territory upon the streams tributary to these, or
a large part of the indefinite West.

To maintain her claims France had erected a cordon of forts extending
diagonally across the continent from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to
the Gulf of Mexico. If one will follow, in thought, a line starting at
Louisburg, and thence running up this great river to Quebec and
Montreal, and thence up Lake Champlain to Crown Point and Ticonderoga,
and on westward and south-westward to Frontenac, Niagara and Detroit,
and thence down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, he will trace
the line across which the two nations looked in defiance at each other,
and see instantaneously that the claims of France were inadmissable, and
that another war was inevitable. It mattered little that of the
forty-five years immediately preceding the treaty of Aix La Chapelle,
fourteen, or one-third of the whole number, had been years of war
between these two neighbors. They were now, after a peace of only half a
dozen years, as ready for a fresh contest as if they were to meet for
the first time upon the battle field. In fact, another conflict was
unavoidable; a conflict of the Teuton with the Gaul; of medievalism with
daylight; of conservatism with progress; of the old Church with the new;
of feudalism with democracy--a conflict which should settle the destiny
of North America, making it English and Protestant, or French and Roman
Catholic; a contest, too, in which the victor was to gain more than he
knew, and the vanquished was to loose more than he ever dreamed of.

Hosti