The Passing of New France | Page 5

summed up briefly. First,
and most important of all, they had to hold the line of the St Lawrence
for a thousand miles in from the sea. Here were their three chief
positions: Louisbourg, Quebec, and Lake Champlain.
Secondly, they had to hold another thousand miles westward, to and
across the Lakes; but especially the country south of Lakes Ontario and
Erie, into the valley of the Ohio. Here there were a few forts, but no

settlements worth speaking of.
Thirdly, they had to hold the valley of the Mississippi, two thousand
miles from north to south. Here there were very few forts, very few
men, and no settlements of any kind. In fact, they held the Mississippi
only by the merest thread, and chiefly because the British colonies had
not yet grown out in that direction. The Mississippi did not come into
the war, though it might have done so. If Montcalm had survived the
battle of the Plains, and if in 1760 the defence of Canada on the St
Lawrence had seemed to him utterly hopeless, his plan would probably
then have been to take his best soldiers from Canada into the interior,
and in the end to New Orleans, there to make a last desperate stand for
France among the swamps. But this plan died with him; and we may
leave the valley of the Mississippi out of our reckoning altogether.
Not so the valley of the Ohio, which, as we have seen, was the
meeting-place of Canada and Louisiana, and the chief gateway to the
West; and which the French and British rivals were both most fiercely
set on possessing. It was here that the world-wide Seven Years' War
first broke out; here that George Washington first appeared as an
American commander; here that Braddock led the first westbound
British army; and here that Montcalm struck his first blow for French
America.
But, as we have also seen, even the valley of the Ohio was less
important than the line of the St Lawrence. The Ohio region was
certainly the right arm of French America. But the St Lawrence was the
body, of which the lungs were Louisbourg, and the head and heart
Quebec. Montcalm saw this at once; and he made no single mistake in
choosing the proper kind of attack and defence during the whole of his
four campaigns.
The British colonies were different in every way from the French. The
French held a long, thin line of four thousand miles, forming an inland
loop from the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, with only
one hundred thousand people sparsely settled in certain spots; the
British filled up the solid inside of this loop with over twelve hundred
thousand people, who had an open seaboard on the Atlantic for two

thousand miles, from Nova Scotia down to Florida.
Now, what could have made such a great difference in growth between
the French and the British colonies, when France had begun with all the
odds of European force and numbers in her favour? The answer is
two-fold: France had no adequate fleets and her colonies had no
adequate freedom.
First, as to fleets. The mere fact that the Old and New Worlds had a sea
between them meant that the power with the best navy would have a
great advantage. The Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, and French all tried
to build empires across the sea. But they all failed whenever they came
to blows with Britain, simply because no empire can live cut up into
separate parts. The sea divided the other empires, while, strange as it
may appear, this same sea united the British. The French were a nation
of landsmen; for one very good reason that they had two land frontiers
to defend. Their kings and statesmen understood armies better than
navies, and the French people themselves liked soldiers better than
sailors. The British, on the other hand, since they lived on an island,
had no land frontiers to defend. The people liked sailors better than
soldiers. And their rulers understood navies better than armies, for the
sea had always been the people's second home.
At this period, whenever war broke out, the British navy was soon able
to win 'the command of the sea'; that is, its squadrons soon made the
sea a safe road for British ships and a very unsafe road for the ships of
an enemy. In America, at that time, everything used in war, from the
regular fleets and armies themselves down to the powder and shot,
cannon and muskets, swords and bayonets, tools, tents, and so on--all
had to be brought across the Atlantic. While this was well enough for
the British, for the French it was always very hard and risky work. In
time of war