Thirteen years—­one for each State—­were occupied in the topping-off.  The Seven Years’ War, that created the new central power of modern Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.  It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material, some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration consequent upon it.  Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that brought on the end.  So closely simultaneous were these with the king’s proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects “from making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west,” as to support the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion of the colonies.  The pressure applied to front and rear was part of one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of legislation to which it was the opening wedge.  The England of that day proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland, the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an Indian Pale.  This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.  They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province of Quebec to the Ohio—­one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the St. Lawrence to the Crown.

As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand characteristic of all Washington’s letters, the following to James Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little more than a stripling: 

    “Mount Vernon, Feb’y 20th, 1774.

“Dear sir:  I have to thank you, for your obliging acc’t of your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the 18th of Octob’r from Winchester—­the other Letter, therein refer’d to, I have never yet receiv’d, nor did this come to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from Williamsburg.