to join in the work, three or four refused, some of the others were lukewarm, and all were slow.  Even Massachusetts, usually the foremost, failed to get all her men into the field till the season was nearly ended.  Having no military establishment, the colonies were forced to improvise a new army for every campaign.  Each of them watched its neighbors, or, jealous lest it should do more than its just share, waited for them to begin.  Each popular assembly acted under the eye of a frugal constituency, who, having little money, were as chary of it as their descendants are lavish; and most of them were shaken by internal conflicts, more absorbing than the great question on which hung the fate of the continent.  Only the four New England colonies were fully earnest for the war, and one, even of these, was ready to use the crisis as a means of extorting concessions from its Governor in return for grants of money and men.  When the lagging contingents came together at last, under a commander whom none of them trusted, they were met by strategical difficulties which would have perplexed older soldiers and an abler general; for they were forced to act on the circumference of a vast semicircle, in a labyrinth of forests, without roads, and choked with every kind of obstruction.

Opposed to them was a trained army, well organized and commanded, focused at Montreal, and moving for attack or defence on two radiating lines,—­one towards Lake Ontario, and the other towards Lake Champlain,—­supported by a martial peasantry, supplied from France with money and material, dependent on no popular vote, having no will but that of its chief, and ready on the instant to strike to right or left as the need required.  It was a compact military absolutism confronting a heterogeneous group of industrial democracies, where the force of numbers was neutralized by diffusion and incoherence.  A long and dismal apprenticeship waited them before they could hope for success; nor could they ever put forth their full strength without a radical change of political conditions and an awakened consciousness of common interests and a common cause.  It was the sense of powerlessness arising from the want of union that, after the fall of Oswego, spread alarm through the northern and middle colonies, and drew these desponding words from William Livingston, of New Jersey:  “The colonies are nearly exhausted, and their funds already anticipated by expensive unexecuted projects.  Jealous are they of each other; some ill-constituted, others shaken with intestine divisions, and, if I may be allowed the expression, parsimonious even to prodigality.  Our assemblies are diffident of their governors, governors despise their assemblies; and both mutually misrepresent each other to the Court of Great Britain.”  Military measures, he proceeds, demand secrecy and despatch; but when so many divided provinces must agree to join in them, secrecy and despatch are impossible.  In conclusion he exclaims:  “Canada must be demolished, —­Delenda est Carthago,—­or we are undone."[435] But Loudon was not Scipio, and cis-Atlantic Carthage was to stand for some time longer.