Boston. This was done, as all the world knows, in the face of the restrictions laid by the mother country on every marine enterprise promoted among the Americans.

New England was the seat of the principal manufacturing interests of the country. Everything in this direction, however, was checked and impeded by the British Board of Trade, whose arbitrary restrictions acted as a damper on all manner of colonial thrift and enterprise. No sooner would some young and prosperous company of New England men begin the building of a factory than this officious Board would interfere in such a way as to make success impossible. So jealous was the English Ministry of American progress! If previous to the Revolution any colonial manufactures were successfully established, it was done against the will of Great Britain and in spite of her mean and churlish opposition.

Such were the American colonies at the time when they first began to act as one in a common cause. New genera tions had now arisen with kindlier feelings and more charitable sentiments than had been entertained by the austere fathers of the seventeenth century. New conditions had appeared, new relations of a complex and international character, which were well calculated to bring the people of the American communities into concord and final union of action. The event which history had reserved as the immediate cause of such approximation and union of effort was the event of war.

CHAPTER XI.

IT was the sense of a common danger that led our colonial fathers of 1754 to unite their energies in repelling a foe equally inimical to all. The time was now at hand when the final struggle should occur between France and England for colonial supremacy in America. It was necessity that compelled the English colonies to combine their energies against the French. We may here note briefly the causes of the war which ensued, first in America and afterwards between the parent nations in Europe.

The first and most efficient of these causes was the conflicting territorial claims of France and England. The latter had colonized the American seaboard; the former had colonized the interior of the continent. Great Britain occupied the coast, but her claims reached far beyond her colonies. The English kings had always proceeded upon the theory that the prior discoveries of the Cabots had established a just claim, not only to the countries along the coast, but also to the great inland region stretching westward to the Pacific.

The claims of France were of a different kind. She had colonized first of all the valley of the St. Lawrence. Montreal, one of her earliest settlements, was planted five hundred miles from the sea. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the French pushed their way westward and southward, first along the shores of the Great Lakes, then to the headwaters of the Wabash, the Illinois, the Wisconsin and the St. Croix, then down these streams to the Mississippi, and then to the Gulf of Mexico.

The historical effect and perhaps the conscious purpose of these movements were easily discoverable. The result was to divide North America by circumscribing the English colonies with a broad band of French territory which would enable France to possess first the great river valleys of the interior, and afterwards the better half of the continent. It might indeed have been apprehended à priori that France and England, occupying the hither verge of Europe, would be the leading nations to colonize the central parts of North America, and also that these two States would ultimately contend for the mastery in the New World. The events corresponded to expectation.

The work of French colonization in America had been chiefly effected by the Jesuit missionaries. In 1641 Charles Raymbault, first of the great explorers, passed through the northern straits of Lake Huron and entered Lake Superior. In the thirty years that followed the Jesuit missionaries continued their explorations with prodigious activity. Missions were established at various points north of the lakes and in the countries afterwards called Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. In 1673 Fathers Joliet and Marquette passed from the headwaters of Fox River over the watershed to the upper tributaries of the Wisconsin, and thence down that river in a seven days' voyage to the Mississippi. It was now a hundred and thirty-three years since the discovery of the Father of Waters by De Soto. For a full month the canoe of Joliet and Marquette bore them downward toward the sea. They passed the mouth of the Arkansas River and reached the limit of their voyage at the thirty-third parallel of latitude. Turning their boat up stream they entered the mouth of the Illinois, and returned by the site of Chicago into Lake Michigan and thence to Detroit.

It remained for Robert de La Salle, most illustrious of

the French explorers, to trace the Mississippi to its mouth. This indomitable adventurer built and launched the first ship above Niagara Falls. He sailed westward through Lake Erie and Lake Huron, anchored in Green Bay, crossed Lake Michigan to the mouth of the St. Joseph, ascended that stream with a few companions, traversed the country to the upper Kankakee and dropped down that stream into the Illinois. Here disasters overtook the expedition and La Salle was obliged to return on foot to Fort Frontenac, a distance of nearly a thousand miles! During his absence Father Hennepin, a member of the company, traversed Illinois, found the Mississippi and ascended the great river as far as the falls of St. Anthony.

In 1681 La Salle reorganized his expedition and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Afterwards he made his way back to Quebec and then returned to France. He formed vast plans for colonizing the valley of the Mississippi and induced Louis XIV. to take an interest in the enterprise. Four ships, bearing two hundred and eighty emigrants, were equipped and left France in July of 1684. Beaujeu commanded the fleet and La Salle led the colony in person. His plan was to plant a new State on the banks of the lower Mississippi. The captain, however, was headstrong, and against La Salle's entreaties steered the squadron out of its course to the west, so that instead of reaching the mouth of the Mississippi he entered the Bay of Matagorda. Here a landing was effected, but the store-ship was wrecked and lost. Nevertheless a colony was established and Texas became a part of Louisiana.

La Salle now made unwearied efforts to rediscover the Mississippi. It would appear that he was not well informed as to the best direction to be taken in order to reach the great river. His expeditions were attended with many misfortunes; but his own resolute spirit remained tranquil in the

midst of calamity. At last he set out with sixteen companions to cross the continent to Canada. The march began in January of 1687 and continued for sixty days. The wanderers reached the basin of the Colorado. Discontent and treachery had in the meantime arisen in his camp. On the 20th of March, while La Salle was at some distance from the rendezvous, two conspirators of his own company hiding in the prairie grass took a fatal aim and shot the famous explorer dead in his tracks. Only seven of the adventurers succeeded in reaching a French settlement on the Mississippi.

It was thus that the great inland circuit of the American lakes and rivers was revealed by exploration to the knowledge of men. France was not slow to occupy the vast region traversed by the Jesuit fathers. As early as 1688 military posts and missions had been established at Frontenac, at Niagara, at the Straits of Mackinac and on the Illinois River. Before the middle of the eighteenth century permanent settlements had been planted by the French on the Maumee, at Detroit, at the mouth of the St. Joseph, at Green Bay, at Vincennes, on the lower Wabash, on the Mississippi at the mouth of the Kaskaskia, at Fort Rosalie-the present site of Natchez-and on the Gulf of Mexico,

A second cause of the conflict about to ensue was the long-standing animosity of France and England. The rivalry between these two great States of Western Europe was as old as the Dark Ages. The jealousy of the one for the other extended over both land and sea. When at the close of the seventeenth century it was seen that the people of the English colonies outnumbered those of New France by nearly twenty to one, the French government was filled with envy. When by the enterprise of the Jesuit missionaries and explorers the French began to dot the basin of the Mississippi with fortresses and to monopolize the fur