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118 The New England colonies. [1748 slow-moving farmer, they did not directly menace the native with extermination. For the extension and support of such a system the Canadian peasantry, ignorant, superstitious, hardy, well treated, after the fashion of children, were admirable instruments. Every man was by law a soldier of the backwoods type, and, moreover, was prepared to rally to the national cause with unquestioning obedience and without expectation of pay, and to march with equal readiness against either Indian or English heretic. How utterly opposite in these respects were the English colonies scarcely needs demonstration. It is, however, hardly possible to insist too strongly on the absence of homogeneity that distinguished them. Their subsequent union has in a great measure caused us to forget how sharp were the lines which divided one from the other, before the policy of France drove them into those crude attempts at combination which the folly of an English government afterwards perfected. The New England provinces formed somewhat of an exception to this state of things. Similar in origin and in type and habits of thought, they fraternised more readily than the rest, and for defensive purposes had often been forced into a military co-operation. In them alone at this time was to be found military capacity or anything approaching to a warlike spirit. The rest of the colonies, succeeding one another on the Atlantic coast as it trended southwards to the newest settlement of Georgia, were but so many detached units with little mutual intercourse. Distances were great, population thin, means of transit primitive. They had all grown up on separate stocks, worked out their own individual destinies on varying lines, and, as a matter of fact, regarded each other with no little jealousy, while such outside intercourse as opportunity or inclination provided was mainly in the direction of the mother-country. This is not the place to take note of their contrasts, social and political. It will be sufficient to say that, unlike the men whom France sent to govern Canada, the Colonial officials, in accordance with the existing English system of patronage, were, as a rule, persons of inferior capacity, and, though small blame attaches to them on this account, lived in perennial disagreement with the provincial legislatures. Speaking broadly, the Anglo-Saxon race in America at this time was confined between the Alleghanies and the sea. This was ample space for all present needs. To the average colonist it seemed no doubt, not unnaturally, ample for all time. Happily there were minds of a more prescient turn among them, while the fact that there were French statesmen who clearly foresaw the pressure of Anglo-Saxon civilisation upon the West has been sufficiently demonstrated. Behind the Alle- ghanies lay that vast and fertile region which drained into the Ohio and thence into the Mississippi. It was a better country, as a whole, than that already occupied by the British colonists. This, however, was then a matter of no significance. It was as yet a far-away