There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those along the Wabash.[12]

The country came into the possession of the British—­not of the colonial English or Americans—­at the close of Pontiac’s war, the aftermath of the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America.  It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter.  It is a curious fact that England immediately adopted towards her own colonists the policy of the very nationality she had ousted.  From the date of the triumphant peace won by Wolfe’s victory, the British government became the most active foe of the spread of the English race in America.  This position Britain maintained for many years after the failure of her attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio valley.  It was the position she occupied when at Ghent in 1814 her commissioners tried to hem in the natural progress of her colonists’ children by the erection of a great “neutral belt” of Indian territory, guaranteed by the British king.  It was the role which her statesmen endeavored to make her play when at a later date they strove to keep Oregon a waste rather than see it peopled by Americans.

In the northwest she succeeded to the French policy as well as the French position.  She wished the land to remain a wilderness, the home of the trapper and the fur trader, of the Indian hunter and the French voyageur.  She desired it to be kept as a barrier against the growth of the seaboard colonies towards the interior.  She regarded the new lands across the Atlantic as being won and settled, not for the benefit of the men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and traders who stayed at home.  It was this that rendered the Revolution inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act or set of acts.  The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of grievances against them, on behalf of the mother country; but on the great underlying question they were wholly in the right, and their success was of vital consequence to the well-being of the race on this continent.

Several of the old colonies urged vague claims to parts of the Northwestern Territory, basing them on ancient charters and Indian treaties; but the British heeded them no more than the French had, and they were very little nearer fulfilment after the defeat of Montcalm and Pontiac than before.  The French had held adverse possession in spite of them for sixty years; the British held similar possession for fifteen more.  The mere statement of the facts is enough to show the intrinsic worthlessness of the titles.