The most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was:  Shall France remain here, or shall she not?  If, by diplomacy or war, she had preserved but the half, or less than the half, of her American possessions, then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking races; there would have been no Revolutionary War; and for a long time, at least, no independence.  It was not a question of scanty populations strung along the banks of the St. Lawrence; it was—­or under a government of any worth it would have been—­a question of the armies and generals of France.  America owes much to the imbecility of Louis XV. and the ambitious vanity and personal dislikes of his mistress.

The Seven Years War made England what she is.  It crippled the commerce of her rival, ruined France in two continents, and blighted her as a colonial power.  It gave England the control of the seas and the mastery of North America and India, made her the first of commercial nations, and prepared that vast colonial system that has planted new Englands in every quarter of the globe.  And while it made England what she is, it supplied to the United States the indispensable condition of their greatness, if not of their national existence.

Before entering on the story of the great contest, we will look at the parties to it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Montcalm and Wolfe

Chapter 1

1745-1755

The Combatants

The latter half of the reign of George ii. was one of the most prosaic periods in English history.  The civil wars and the Restoration had had their enthusiasms, religion and liberty on one side, and loyalty on the other; but the old fires declined when William iii. came to the throne, and died to ashes under the House of Hanover.  Loyalty lost half its inspiration when it lost the tenet of the divine right of kings; and nobody could now hold that tenet with any consistency except the defeated and despairing Jacobites.  Nor had anybody as yet proclaimed the rival dogma of the divine right of the people.  The reigning monarch held his crown neither of God nor of the nation, but of a parliament controlled by a ruling class.  The Whig aristocracy had done a priceless service to English liberty.  It was full of political capacity, and by no means void of patriotism; but it was only a part of the national life.  Nor was it at present moved by political emotions in any high sense.  It had done its great work when it expelled the Stuarts and placed William of Orange on the throne; its ascendency was now complete.  The Stuarts had received their death-blow at Culloden; and nothing was left to the dominant party but to dispute on subordinate questions, and contend for office among themselves.  The Troy squires sulked in their country-houses, hunted foxes, and grumbled against the reigning dynasty; yet hardly wished to see the nation convulsed by a counter-revolution and another return of the Stuarts.