1753.

THE LAST OF THE FLEET PARSON.

373 in a half-unconscious state to some elderly prostitute perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his fee-and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke's Act stopped the business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.

Years went on-years of quiet at home, save for little Ministerial wrangles-years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not last-that was not meant to last. If no other European power would have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have As we have seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without regard to treaties and truces on the European Continent. There was, in fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out. England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and

a dispute concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance to the genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The breaking out of war in North America established England as the controlling power there, and settled for ever the pretensions of France and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the course of the Contitinental wars. The great results of these to England were worked out on other soil.

CHAPTER XL.

CANADA.

6

WE have seen that, when the young Duke of Cumberland, after the battle of Culloden, was earning his right to the title of Butcher,' one English officer at least had the courage to protest by his actions against the atrocities of the English general. That soldier was James Wolfe, then a young lieutenant-colonel, who had served his apprenticeship to arms in the Low Countries in the war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honourable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer, a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more the better men among

those Puritan soldiers who rallied around the name of Cromwell and battled beneath the standards of Monk. He cherished an austere ideal of public and private virtue. The sweet, simple gravity of the man's nature lives for us very vividly in the portrait Thackeray draws of him in the pages of 'The Virginians,' where so many of the famous figures of the crowded last century world seem to take bodily shape again and live and move around us.

From the end of the fifteenth century, when John and Sebastian Cabot discovered Canada, France considered that portion of the new world as her own. Early in the sixteenth century a French expedition under Verazani formed a settlement named New France, and eleven years later the Breton Jacques Cartier ascended the Saint Lawrence as far as the site of Montreal. The first permanent settlement was made in 1608, when Quebec was founded. From that time Quebec seems like the prize for which English and French arms are to strive. Canada was taken by the English in 1629, only to be restored in 1632; but when more than a century later France and England were newly at war, the serious and final struggle for the possession of Canada took place.

The French settlements in America were called Canada and Louisiana. The one comprehended the basin of the Saint Lawrence river and the great lakes, with a vast extent of territory west and north to the Pacific and Arctic oceans. It was, as has been happily said, a convenient maxim in those days of

1756.

ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN CANADA.

377

our colonisation, that whoever possessed the coast had a right to all the inland territory as far as from sea to sea. While this gave England its boundaries from north to south, it left from east to west open to French fancy and French ambition. Louisiana was a term which covered in English eyes only the Mississippi mouths and a few stations along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; in French minds the term extended to all the territory bounded to the north by Canada and to the south by Mexico, and stretching from the Alleghanies to the Pacific.

The French settlements in Canada were administered very much upon the same happy-go-lucky system as that which prevailed in France at home under the beneficent influence of the Old Order, and which at home was slowly and surely preparing the way for the French Revolution. The ministers in Paris governed the colonies through governors who were supreme in their own districts, but who possessed no power whatever of initiating any laws for the people they swayed.

The English colonies were very different from those of the French. Founded in the early days of religious persecution by men too strong-minded to accept tyranny or to make composition with their consciences, the new colonies of Englishmen in America had thriven in accordance with the antique spirit of independence which had called them into existence. The colonists were a hardy, a stubborn, and a high-minded people, well fitted to battle with the elements and the Indians, and to preserve, under