Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/146

CHAPTER IV. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA. THE four years' war between England and France, which closed in 1748 with the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, was waged by both nations with little reference to their possessions in North America. The small French settlement of Louisiana, founded at the close of the seventeenth century for the better control of the Mississippi, was not yet in touch with the English colonists of Georgia and the Carolinas, and there had been no possibility of friction. Great as was its significance in view of those vast ambitions of France that were the immediate cause of the events with which this chapter deals, its occupants were too few and too remotely situated to take any part in the struggle. Planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, they were little more than a futile reminder of the splendid opportunities which the moment held for France opportunities practically stultified by the policy which revoked the Edict of Nantes. French Huguenots had been already pouring by thousands into the Carolinas. Their overtures for land and liberty of worship under French rule had been spurned by the officials of the weak and somewhat stagnant colony at the mouth of the great river. The King, they were curtly told, had not turned them out of France in order to build up French Protestant republics in America. So the French Huguenots mingled their blood and energy with the successful foes of France, and ultimately became a source of strength to an English- speaking republic. The contesting forces which at this epoch were to settle the destinies of North America were numerically insignificant ; and it is possible that ten thousand sturdy Huguenot settlers sent up the Mississippi at this moment might have changed the history of the world. But along the ill-defined and sparsely settled borders of Canada, where they fronted New York, the New England colonies, and the Crown province of Nova Scotia or Acadia, there was continual friction and bloodshed, which formal declarations of war did little more than aggravate. Neither in the days prior to the European war of 1744-48 nor during it was there any operation worthy of notice in this district except the siege and capture of Louisbourg. For the rest it is sufficiently