Maryland and royal Virginia. The English Parliament had to wage a long and bitter fight in the seventeenth century to defend certain fundamental liberties against the encroachment of the royal prerogative. The American colonies, in a remote and virgin land, were relieved of the weight of that prerogative. With royal and proprietary appointees dependent on the grants of their assemblies for their very bread, with a trade rapidly outgrowing and successfully defying the restraints put upon it by the home government, with increasing neglect and contempt of acts of Parliament strictly worded but laxly enforced, the colonies came to regard the lawful intervention of the king in their affairs like the unwarranted intrusion of a tyrant.

Today colonies in civilized lands are bound to the mother country generally by a rather loose federation, their allegiance depending less on any explicit political pact than on a sentiment of pride in the common glory of the empire. But the theory of colonial control prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved, as we have seen, the strict regulation of colonial commerce in the interests of national dominion, and the responsibility of colonial political authorities for the maintenance of the commercial system. To have put this theory into successful operation in the American colonies would have required one of two things: either a complete unity of interests between the colonies and the mother country (such as was assumed again and again in the affable proclamations of English monarchs from Charles I to George III) or the utter subserviency of the colonies to the English crown and Parliament. The first of these alternatives the colonies knew was a fiction; the second they felt was an insult. Here, then, in the failure of British control in the colonies of the seventeenth century, is the germ of the American Revolution. The eighteenth century will only furnish the cumulative evidence of the failure of the policy of the seventeenth, and in the end will dissolve those bonds which it is hardly an exaggeration to say were never formed.

THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH

From the accession of William of Orange to the English throne, in 1689, to the fall of Quebec, seventy years later, the one constant factor in the history of the English colonies in America was the presence and pressure of the French on their northern and western borders—"the Gallic peril.” Estab-| lished in permanent settlements on the shores of the Bay of Fundy and the banks of the St. Lawrence at about the same time that the English colonies were started in Virginia and New England,1 the French had had a very different history and development. The rapidly growing English colonies had expended their energy intensively in economic and political activities, cultivating their tobacco, wheat, and rice for export, building up their commercial ports, exploiting the forests and fisheries near their coasts, and developing their organs of local government in assemblies, courts, vestries, and town meetings. The French in Canada, on, the other hand, forbidden the least exercise of self-government by the despotic authority of Louis XIV, scantily supplied with capital for the cultivation of the unremunerative glacial soil of the St. Lawrence valley, themselves but a handful of men in a vast wilderness, found an outlet for their restless spirits in ambitious schemes for winning a continent for the glory of France and its savage tribes for the Church of Rome. The story, in all its thrilling details of courage and pathos, of cruelty and persecution, can be read in Francis Parkman's unrivaled volumes on the French in America. Before the close of the Stuart period the French adventurers and missionaries, the fur-traders and wood-rangers (coureurs de bois), had gone up the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, established their forts and missions as far west as the point of Lake Superior, crossed the portages from Lakes Erie

1 Port Royal, Acadia, was founded in 1604, Jamestown in 1607, Quebec in 1608, Plymouth in 1620, Maryland in 1632, Montreal in 1642. An interesting anticipation of the long rivalry between France and England in America was Samuel Argall's attack on Port Royal in 1613, on the ground that the settlement was within the limits of the Virginia grant of 1606.

and Michigan to the headwaters of the Ohio basin, ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and finally, in the person of the intrepid Cavelier de La Salle, followed the Father of Waters down to its mouth and planted the lilies of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. So the French power extended, with its sparse cordon of forts, missions, and fur posts, in a huge arc of twenty-five hundred miles, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi completely enveloping the English colonies on the Atlantic coast.

The English began to realize the "Gallic peril" in the fateful decade that saw the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. Thomas Dongan, the Duke of York's able governor, arriving in his American province of New York the year after La Salle had reached the mouth of the Mississippi (1683), found the province in dire danger. Count Frontenac, governor of New France, had just completed a ten-year period of vigorous rule at Quebec. He had labored without ceasing to extend the bounds of New France, to increase its military efficiency, and to unite its inhabitants in enthusiasm for the maintenance of the power of Louis XIV on the American continent. He was especially concerned to win the confidence of the Seneca Indians, so that he might gain access to the Ohio valley through their lands to the south of Lake Ontario.1 He even entertained the hope of weaning the Iroquois tribes from their attachment to the English and of descending the valley of the Hudson with his French troops and Indian allies to drive the Duke of York's governor from his capital. Thus he would sever the New England colonies from their southern sisters and secure for the king

1 The Senecas were the westernmost and largest tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, a league of five semicivilized tribes extending across the central part of New York from Lake Erie to the lower Mohawk valley. In 1609 Champlain, by joining the Algonquins in a battle against the Iroquois, had inspired in the latter a fierce hatred against the French, which devoted Jesuit missionaries and successive governors at Quebec labored in vain to remove. The friendship of the Iroquois proved of inestimable advantage to the English on the Hudson. The Indians acted as a buffer against the French and kept them from reaching the Mississippi Valley by the easy route south of the Great Lakes.

of France the finest harbor on the Atlantic coast for the terminal of the important fur trade of the vast interior.

Dongan's spirited correspondence with Frontenac's successors, La Barre and Denonville, is the first clear note of defiance sounded by the English against the encroachments of the French. Dongan was in the midst of his ardent epistolary altercation with Denonville when Governor Andros arrived in Boston (December 20, 1686) to fuse the colonies of New England, with New York and New Jersey, into a single royal province.

We have already noticed the mission of Andros as the last attempt of the Stuarts to secure recognition of their authority and obedience to their commercial regulation in the American colonies (see page 25). But the Andros government has another aspect quite as important. It was not only the culmination of the Stuart policy of the seventeenth century but also the foreshadowing of the Hanoverian policy of the eighteenth; namely, the consolidation of the colonies to meet the threat of the French and Indians on their borders. Andros brought a few British redcoats to Boston and made plans for the chastisement of the Indians, who, under French provocation, were threatening the settlements in Maine and New Hampshire. But he had no support from the colonies. In their eyes he was a greater danger even than the Indians, for he was an enemy to their chartered rights, an Anglican infected with "prelatical corruption," and the devoted servant of a "popish" king. Instead of trusting him to defend them against

1 A few years before Dongan's arrival the intendant of New France at Quebec wrote to Paris that a "grand future" was before the French in Canada and that "the colonies of foreign nations (England) so long settled on the seaboard [were] trembling with fright" in view of what Louis XIV had accomplished. But Dongan's letters give little hint of fear. The bluff old Irishman spared neither vituperation nor sarcasm. He wrote Denonville to know whether "a few loose fellows rambling among the Indians to keep from starving gave France a right to the country," or the fact that "some rivers or rivuletts run out into the great river of Canada." "O just God !" he exclaimed, "what new farrefetched and unheard-of pretense is this for the title to a country! The French King may have as good a pretense to all those countreys that drink clarette and brandy!"