It was regretfully, and as if compelled by a remnant of national honor, that Louis XV. had just adopted the resolution of defending his colonies; he had, and the nation had as well, the feeling that the French were hopelessly weak at sea.  “What use to us will be hosts of troops and plenty of money,” wrote the advocate Barbier, “if we have only to fight the English at sea?  They will take all our ships one after another, they will seize all our settlements in America, and will get all the trade.  We must hope for some division amongst the English nation itself, for the king personally does not desire war.”

The English nation was not divided.  The ministers and the Parliament, as well as the American colonies, were for war.  “There is no hope of repose for our thirteen colonies, as long as the French are masters of Canada,” said Benjamin Franklin, on his arrival in London in 1754.  He was already laboring, without knowing it, at that great work of American independence which was to be his glory and that of his generation; the common efforts and the common interest of the thirteen American colonies in the war against France were the first step towards that great coalition which founded the United States of America.

The union with the mother-country was as yet close and potent:  at the instigation of Mr. Fox, soon afterwards Lord Holland, and at the time Prime Minister of England, Parliament voted twenty-five millions for the American war.  The bounty given to the soldiers and marines who enlisted was doubled by private subscription; fifteen thousand men were thus raised to invade the French colonies.

Canada and Louisiana together did not number eighty thousand inhabitants, whilst the population of the English colonies already amounted to twelve hundred thousand souls; to the twenty-eight hundred regular troops sent from France, the Canadian militia added about four thousand men, less experienced but quite as determined as the most intrepid veterans of the campaigns in Europe.  During more than twenty years the courage and devotion of the Canadians never faltered for a single day.

Then began an unequal, but an obstinate struggle, of which the issue, easy to foresee, never cowed or appeased the actors in it.  The able tactics of M. de Vaudreuil, governor of the colony, had forced the English to scatter their forces and their attacks over an immense territory, far away from the most important settlements; the forts which they besieged were scarcely defended.  “A large enclosure, with a palisade round it, in which there were but one officer and nineteen soldiers,” wrote the Marquis of Montcalm at a later period, “could not be considered as a fort adapted to sustain a siege.”  In the first campaign, the settlements formed by the Acadian emigrants on the borders of the Bay of Fundy were completely destroyed:  the French garrisons were obliged to evacuate their positions.

This withdrawal left Acadia, or neutral land, at the mercy of the Anglo-Americans.  Before Longfellow had immortalized, in the poem of Evangeline, the peaceful habits and the misfortunes of the Acadians, Raynal had already pleaded their cause before history.  “A simple and a kindly people,” he said, “who had no liking for blood, agriculture was their occupation.