gerous in view of French expansion both in North America and in India throughout the period of the continental wars. Without a navy adequate for its defense, colonial empire reposed on a precarious foundation. How insecure this really was did not become at once apparent, for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 restored the status quo ante bellum, each power surrendering its conquests, save that the predatory Frederick maintained his hold on Silesia.

The short interval of peace ensuing was attended by a considerable shifting in alliances, and when in 1756 Maria Theresa once more took the field against Frederick, she had won France, Sweden, and Russia to her cause. But this time England, consistent in her opposition to France, supported Frederick, chiefly by doles and grants, while her own interests were served by Clive and Wolfe in the conquest of an empire. For America the crisis was epochal. In the face of attack on their long frontier, the colonies demonstrated an utter incapacity for united action. The unified command of the Marquis de Montcalm and Levis, his brilliant lieutenant, wrought havoc and disaster from Pittsburgh to Fort William Henry. Only the advent in power at London of William Pitt the Elder, greatest of English administrators and empire builders, saved the country from the incompetents and grafters who clogged the public service, and inspired and sustained the intrepid souls who at Louisburg, on Lake Champlain, on Lake Ontario, and finally at Quebec and Montreal brought into effective play the superior resources of Britain and her colonies. The death of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham (1759) destroyed the last remaining hope of France in the New World. There was justice, notwithstanding, in the observation of Pitt that the real decision of the war was reached on the battle-fields of Europe. Few French troops crossed the sea.8

The French and Indian War constituted the greatest event in American history from the settlement down to the Revolution. "On the Heights of Abraham," says Park

8 The student is referred to the works of Francis Parkman for the most vivid account of these epic contests for empire.

man, "began the history of the United States." Once again Americans participated on a large scale in the military operations which insured the British triumph-a fresh reminder of America's importance in the empire as a whole. But as has been frequently noted by historians, the terms of settlement imposed by the victor constituted a determining factor in the later relations of the colonies with the mother country. Confronted with the choice between all of Canada and the small sugar islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique, it may be surprising that Britain hesitated. But the choice was less simple than it appeared. To occupy Canada meant to weaken the sense of dependence of the North American colonies, no longer bound to England by a fear of Frenchmen and their Indian allies. To gain possession of the sugar islands meant to obtain a more lucrative prize than all of Canada combined. The singular desirability of sugar islands has been noted, it will be remembered, in the discussion of those mercantilist principles on which the whole concept of empire was framed. Opposition of England's existing sugar colonies to the competition of new colonies proved to be the decisive factor. In finally determining upon Canada, Great Britain gave ground for the prophecies of French statesmen that, freed from the bogey of France and harassed by the restrictions of Great Britain, the colonists must soon seek independence.

GEORGE III AND HIS POLICIES

In the midst of the war, the English throne passed to a young king whose personality was itself to be a factor in the imperial system which the genius of Pitt had done so much to erect. George III had what the Germans call the "will to power." One of his first acts was the overthrow of the great minister. The prime object of George's personal policy was to uplift the monarchy as an institution from the decay to which it had fallen in the two preceding reigns. But it is unfair in the years which followed the

9 Pitman, Frank Wesley, The Development of the British West Indies 1700-1763 (New Haven, 1917), pages 334-360.

French war to attribute the increasing tension between the colonies and Great Britain solely to the obstinacy or incapacity of the king. The peace of 1763 saddled England with debts as well as colonies. The vast accessions to the empire created an administrative problem which any government must find embarrassing, and no solution of which could satisfy all the interests involved. From 1607 to 1763 the empire was in the making. From 1763 to 1775 it moved rapidly to its fall.

The government overseas produced a painful impression on the colonists by a series of wholly separate regulations which seemed, however, a concerted plan to coerce and thwart them. Westerners were affronted at a proclamation in 1763 excluding from settlement land beyond the Alleghenies, a regulation which could easily have been rendered more palatable had the government explained its temporary character, the official intention contemplating only a suspension of occupation till Indian titles had been extinguished and a pacification achieved.10 Commercial interests were next antagonized by the Molasses Act of 1764, which barred the rum and sugar trade of New England from all but the British West Indies, and correspondingly upset the market for American lumber, staves, wheat, and fish a serious blow to the economic equilibrium of the country." By its increased duty on sugar and its closing of American ports to foreign molasses, by its stern provisions against smugglers, the act endangered the entire economic life of New England, so intimately bound up with slaves, molasses, and rum, and the exports needed to procure them. The most articulate interests of the country, the business men and lawyers, were next irritated by the Stamp Act, of 1765, a measure which the ministry instituted with some reluctance, and not without consulting Benjamin Franklin and other Americans as to whether the funds required could be procured in a less objectionable manner by

10 Alvord, Clarence Walworth, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (Cleveland, 1916), vol. I, 199-206.

11 For an elaborate examination of American commercial conditions at this period see, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (New York, 1918) by Arthur Meier Schlesinger.

direct grant of the several colonial legislatures. American opinion being that such a method was not feasible, the Act was reported, and passed immediately by a Parliament wholly unconscious of the political dynamite it contained. When so keen an observer as Franklin applied for a stamp distributorship on behalf of one of his own kinsmen, British apathy toward the measure is not surprising. But in America the storm of protest broke with a suddenness and fury beyond the comprehension of English legislators. Repeal was their sole recourse, and rejoicing in America was unbounded. Joy over the Stamp Act repeal was somewhat dimmed by the passage, almost at the same time, of the Declaratory Act. This affirmed in legal phrase the theory of Parliament's supremacy, the theory least compatible with colonial independence.

CONFLICTING THEORIES OF EMPIRE

The actual problem of revenue and the more theoretical problem of the relation of the colonies to the empire were, therefore, as far as ever from solution. Two diverging tendencies competed thence forward till the Revolution. On the one hand, Great Britain under the twin compulsion of mercantilism and imperialism was driven into an ever harsher reiteration of the final authority of Parliament. At the same time actual tax bills were framed with greater regard to their probable effect on American opinion. On both points, Parliament seemed to be on strong ground; certainly on the former, for Parliamentary supremacy was the undoubted result of the Seventeenth Century revolutions, and the Empire knew no higher court of appeal. Certainly as imperialism was understood by most people at the time, if the colonies remained within the empire, they remained subordinate to Parliament, the final repository of authority, the arbiter, the sovereign.

In America, a countercurrent was setting in. Even the furious opposition to the Stamp Act centered on its expediency, not on its legality. But the renewed agitations over the Townsend Act and the tea duties led men to question the

fundamental sovereignty of the empire. Was a Parliament in which no Americans sat a lawful assessor of American taxation? To a people grown accustomed to representation by geographical districts as distinguished from representation by classes and interests, such a question once raised could have but one answer. The slogan "Taxation without representation" is in reality the catchword of district representation as contrasted with the English principle of class representation, clergy for the church, nobility for the large landholders, knights for the gentry, and burgesses for the citizens, a method which, with some modifications, had obtained since the earliest times. According to British theory, America really was represented in Parliament since there was scarcely a class in America without a counterpart in England which was so represented. Yet according to American theory it was equally obvious that we were not represented.12

The issues raised by this question of sovereignty between the colonies and the mother country fostered the creation of two definite political parties in America and provided a more clearcut issue for existing political parties in England. British Tories supported the King in his revival of monarchy. American Tories accepted the principle of Parliamentary supremacy. American Whigs, by denying this supremacy, fell back in part upon the doctrine of the sovereignty of the Crown as vested personally in the monarch. The dangerous implications of this ancient doctrine were concealed by the existing inferiority of King to Parliament. It lay at the basis of Irish claims to independence of the British Parliament and is even now invoked by the people of the Channel Islands who recognize the English King as lineal successor to their Norman Duke, but deny that Parliament has any power to bind them. At all events the Whig denial of the supremacy of Parliament wrought toward a political philosophy which constituted the necessary intellectual basis for the Revolution by force of arms toward

12 For a valuable analysis of political theories of the Revolutionary epoch, see Political Ideas of the American Revolution, by Randolph Greenfield Adams. (Duke University Press, 1922.)