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1748] The French colonies. 117 So far the struggle between England and France had not been seriously felt in America ; but the ink was scarcely dry upon the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, when the French rulers of Canada commenced a policy, which forbade all hope of a lasting peace. The French repre- sentative at this juncture was de la Gallissoniere, who was afterwards conspicuous as the opponent at Minorca of the ill-fated Byng. To him belongs the credit of those aggressions in the American hinterland which ultimately stirred England and her colonists to military endeavours on a scale hitherto undreamt of, and resulted in the eventual loss to France of her transatlantic empire. That the issue of so momentous a struggle, strange though it now seems, was for some time in doubt, should also be remembered to the further credit of the able Frenchman who conceived, his contemporaries who supported, his successors who continued, so daring a policy. At first sight, from our modern point of view, such a contest would seem a hopelessly unequal one. A few words to correct so natural an impression are indeed almost necessary, before proceeding to the struggle itself. When it is noted that the French in North America then numbered less than 80,000, while the British colonies contained a million white inhabitants, exclusively of negro slaves, this might seem to confirm rather than modify the impression in question. But here for military purposes the superiority of the English ended. All other advantages were with the French, and some of these were very great. Though Canada was numerically so feeble, consisting almost wholly of the settlements on the St Lawrence between and near Quebec and Montreal, its government was an absolute one. The King exercised an unquestioned rule in lay matters, and the Church in clerical. Canada's vast fur-trade was the main object of its existence in the eyes of its owners, and the agricultural settlers were chiefly valued as growing food for those engaged in it or as furnishing soldiers for the protection of its interests. The mission of the English colonist was to make a home for himself where he and perchance his children after him might live and die. Upon these sound lines the Anglo-American social and legal fabric rested. The statesmen who governed Canada from their high-perched palace on the rock of Quebec, had far wider, if less stable, aims than the practically self-governing English farmer or planter. The habitants, who under feudal tenure gathered in their limited harvests by the St Lawrence, were not undervalued; indeed their comparative paucity was a matter for constant regret, but they were regarded as mere useful adjuncts to the fur-trade, that great source of profit to the King and still more to his agents. In this not the King only and his immediate servants were interested, but every man of position and education in the colony. The territorial appetite and ambition of the fur-traders were insatiable ; and their aims were the more formidable to civilised rivals, since, unlike the more limited aggressions of the