the command of more available military forces than were at the disposal of the English. Thus the fight dragged on, and was constantly maintained in Acadia, where the sovereignty had been early disputed, and the border never properly settled. At last, when under the leadership of the elder Pitt (see Chatham, Earl of) England set to work resolutely to force a final settlement, the end came. The British navy cut off the French from all help from home, and after a gallant struggle, their dominion in Canada was conquered, and the French retired from the North American continent. They surrendered Louisiana to Spain, which had suffered much in an attempt to help them, and their possessions in America were reduced to their islands in the West Indies and French Guiana.
The fall of the French dominion on the continent of North America was practically the beginning of the existence of independent nations of European origin in the New World. The causes which led to the revolt of the Plantations, the political and military history of the War of Independence, are dealt with under the heading of United States (History) and American War of Independence. The significance of these great events in the general history of America is that from 1783 onwards there was, in the New World, an autonomous community not wholly unified at once, nor without strife, but self-governing and self-subsisting, in entire separation from European control. Such a polity, surrounded as it was by territory dependent on European sovereigns, could not be without a profound influence on its neighbours. Of deliberate direct action there was not much, nor was it needed. The peoples of the thirteen states which had secured emancipation from British sovereignty were wisely intent on framing their own Federal Union, and in taking effective possession of the vast territories in the Ohio region and beyond the Mississippi. But their example worked. Their independence tempted, their prosperity stimulated. From the freedom of the United States came the revolt of Spanish America, and the grant by Great Britain to Canada of the amplest rights of self-government.
The effect which the establishment of the great northern republic was bound to have on their own colonies was not unknown to the wiser among the rulers of Spain. They took, however, few and weak steps to counteract the visible peril. During the later 17th century and the whole of the 18th, the history of the Spanish colonies and of the Portuguese in Brazil, was not, as has often been said, one of pure stagnation. Apart from such a peculiar development as the rise, formation and fall of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, there was growth and change. The Creole population increased and was steadily recruited from home. Apart from settlers who came for trade, the flow of government officials, and soldiers, both officers and men, ended generally in recruiting the Creole element. The newcomers married in the country, and died there, leaving their families to grow up Americans. San Martin, the military leader of Buenos Aires in the revolt, was the son of a Spanish army officer and a Creole mother, and he is quoted as the example of thousands. He was educated in Spain, and began as an officer in the Spanish army. Increasing numbers of Creoles came home for education, and though they rarely went beyond Spain, yet Spain itself was being permeated by the influence of French philosophic and economic writers. The Creoles brought back new ideas. Slow as the Spanish government was to move, and obstinately as it clung to old ways, it was forced to remove restrictions on trade, largely by the discovery that it could not prevent smuggling, which was, in fact, carried on with the connivance of its own corrupt officials. The attempt to prevent all trade on the river Plate was given up, and a vigorous commercial community arose. A revolt of the Indians in Peru in 1780, which was savagely suppressed, forced the government to take note of the abuses of its colonial administration. Many reforms were introduced. Spanish America was never so well governed as at the end of the 18th century, and was on the whole prosperous. But the reforms and concessions of Spain came too late. In commerce it had to compete with the highly developed maritime industry of Great Britain. In government it had to meet with the growing discontent of the Creoles, who found themselves treated as children, and their country looked on as a milch cow. The wars of the French Revolution and of the emperor Napoleon, in which Spain was entangled, interrupted its communications with its colonies, and weakened its hold on them. The defeat, in 1806 and 1807, of two British expeditions to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, resulting in the capitulation of the English force, gave a great impulse to the self-reliance of the colonists, to whom the credit of the victory entirely belonged. When the intervention of Napoleon in Spain plunged the mother country into anarchy, the colonists began to act for themselves. They were still loyal, but they were no longer passive. The brutality of some Spanish governors on the spot provoked anger. The cortes assembled in Cadiz, being under the influence of the merchants and mob, could make no concessions, and all Spanish America flamed into revolt. For the details of the struggle the reader must refer to the articles Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela. Brazil followed the same course in a milder way and a little later. The struggle of Spanish America for independence lasted from 1810 to 1826.
This vast extension of the area of independence in America could not but have its proportionate effect on the general balance of power among nations. So long as Spain retained her colonies on the mainland, while England held Canada, and the English, Dutch and French had possessions in Guiana, the New World must have remained in political dependence on the Old. When the Spanish colonies secured effective independence, and even before their freedom was formally recognized, foreign sovereignty became at once the exception in America. The change thus established de facto owed its first diplomatic consecration to the developments of international politics in the Old World. The committee of the great powers which, since the downfall of Napoleon, had succeeded to the authority which he had usurped in Europe (see Europe: History), was for the few years of its unbroken existence fully occupied with the task of preserving the “European Confederation” from the peril to its peace of renewed revolutionary outbreaks. As early as the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), however, the question of the relations of Spain and her colonies had been brought up and the suggestion made of concerted intervention, to put an end to a state of things scandalous in itself and dangerous, if only by force of example, to the monarchical principle. The proposal came to nothing, and fared no better when revived at subsequent conferences, owing to the opposition of Great Britain and of Spain herself. Spanish pride resented the interference of an alliance in which Spain had no part; Great Britain could not afford to allow any action to be taken which might end in the re-establishment of the old Spanish colonial system and the destruction of the considerable British trade, still nominally contraband, which had grown up with the colonies during the troubles. Had the Spanish government frankly accepted the situation and acknowledged the trade as legitimate, England would have had no objection to the re-establishment of the Spanish sovereignty in America. But the stubborn blindness of Ferdinand VII. and his ministers made any such solution impossible, and, before the meeting of the congress of Verona, in 1822, Castlereagh had realized the eventual necessity of recognizing the independence of the South American states. Matters were brought to a crisis by the outcome of the Verona conferences (see Verona, Congress of), and the re-establishment, in 1823, of the absolute power of the king in Spain by French arms and under French influence, the logical consequence of which seemed to be the reconquest, with the aid of France, of the Spanish colonies. Great Britain could not afford to stand aside and watch the accomplishment of an ambition to prevent which she had, at immense sacrifice of blood and treasure, overthrown the power of Louis XIV. and of Napoleon. She had exhausted every art of diplomatic obstruction to the aggressive action of France; her counterstroke to the unexpectedly easy victory of the French arms was the formal recognition of the revolted colonies as independent states. “If France has Spain,” cried Canning in parliament, “at least it shall be Spain without the Indies. We have called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”
On the 23rd of July 1824, a commercial treaty was signed
