of rulers.  Princes, great and small, brooded over some real or fancied wrong, nursed some dubious claim born of a marriage, a will, or an ancient covenant fished out of the abyss of time, and watched their moment to make it good.  The general opportunity came when, in 1740, the Emperor Charles VI. died and bequeathed his personal dominions of the House of Austria to his daughter, Maria Theresa.  The chief Powers of Europe had been pledged in advance to sustain the will; and pending the event, the veteran Prince Eugene had said that two hundred thousand soldiers would be worth all their guaranties together.  The two hundred thousand were not there, and not a sovereign kept his word.  They flocked to share the spoil, and parcel out the motley heritage of the young Queen.  Frederic of Prussia led the way, invaded her province of Silesia, seized it, and kept it.  The Elector of Bavaria and the King of Spain claimed their share, and the Elector of Saxony and the King of Sardinia prepared to follow the example.  France took part with Bavaria, and intrigued to set the imperial crown on the head of the Elector, thinking to ruin her old enemy, the House of Austria, and rule Germany through an emperor too weak to dispense with her support.  England, jealous of her designs, trembling for the balance of power, and anxious for the Hanoverian possessions of her king, threw herself into the strife on the side of Austria.  It was now that, in the Diet at Presburg, the beautiful and distressed Queen, her infant in her arms, made her memorable appeal to the wild chivalry of her Hungarian nobles; and, clashing their swords, they shouted with one voice:  “Let us die for our king, Maria Theresa;” Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria,—­one of the most dramatic scenes in history; not quite true, perhaps, but near the truth.  Then came that confusion worse confounded called the war of the Austrian Succession, with its Mollwitz, its Dettingen, its Fontenoy, and its Scotch episode of Culloden.  The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle closed the strife in 1748.  Europe had time to breathe; but the germs of discord remained alive.

The American Combatants

The French claimed all America, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, and from Mexico and Florida to the North Pole, except only the ill-defined possessions of the English on the borders of Hudson Bay; and to these vast regions, with adjacent islands, they gave the general name of New France.  They controlled the highways of the continent, for they held its two great rivers.  First, they had seized the St. Lawrence, and then planted themselves at the mouth of the Mississippi.  Canada at the north, and Louisiana at the south, were the keys of a boundless interior, rich with incalculable possibilities.  The English colonies, ranged along the Atlantic coast, had no royal road to the great inland, and were, in a manner, shut between the mountains and the sea.  At the middle of the century they numbered in all, from Georgia to Maine, about eleven