On the division, the opponents of the treaty were but sixty-five against three hundred and nineteen. "Now," said the princess dowager, on hearing the great majority, "my son is indeed king of England." Yet Townshend, who had so much contributed to swell the vote, in the prog ress of his own ambition, had for a rival Halifax, his old superior at the board of trade, who was equally desirous of the department of the colonies, with the rank of a secretary of state. 1763. In the first days of January, 1763, it was publicly avowed what had long been resolved on, that a standing army of twenty battalions was to be kept up in America after the peace; and, as the ministry were all the while promising great things in point of economy, it was designed that the expense should be defrayed by the colonists themselves. On the tenth day of February, 1763, the treaty was ratified; and five days afterwards, at the hunting-castle of Hubertsburg, a definitive treaty closed the war of the em press queen and the elector of Saxony against the great Frederic. The year of 1761 had ended for Frederic in gloom. Hardly sixty thousand men remained to him to resist the whole circle of his enemies. He has himself described the extremity of his distress, and has proudly bid the world learn from his example that, in great affairs, perseverance lifts statesmen above perils. Deserted most unexpectedly by George III., he found Russia suddenly transformed from an enemy to an ally, desirable from its strength, yet dangerous from the indiscretions of its sovereign. But when the seizure of domains of the Russian clergy by Peter III., and the introduction of an unwonted military system, had provoked the clergy and the army to effect a revolution by his dethronement and murder, his wife Catharine a German princess, who had adopted the religion and carefully studied the language, the customs, and institutions of Russia; a woman of such endowments that she was held to be the ablest person in its court- was advanced, over the ruin of her husband, to the throne of the czars. More wise than her predecessor, she abandoned 1763. projects of war and revenge; and in the midsummer of 1762, recalling the Russian army, she gave to the world the instructive lesson of moderation and neutrality. The territories of Prussia, which France had evacuated, Bute left, as he said, "to be scrambled for; " but there was no one to wrest them from Frederic; and, after seven years of unequalled effort against the aristocracies and despotisms of continental Europe, the hero of Prussia won a triumph for freedom by the glorious treaty of Hubertsburg, which gave security of existence to his state without the cession of a hand's-breadth of his dominions. Thus was arrested the course of carnage and misery; of sorrows in private life infinite and unfathomable; of wretchedness heaped on wretchedness; of public poverty and calamity; of forced enlistments and extorted contributions; and all the unbridled tyranny of military power in the day of danger. France was exhausted of one half of her specie; in many parts of Germany, there remained not enough of men or of cattle to renew cultivation. ber of the dead in arms is computed at eight hundred and eighty-six thousand on the battle-fields of Europe, or on the way to them. And all this devastation and waste of life and of resources produced for those who planned it no gain whatever, nothing but weakness and losses. Not an inch of land was torn from the dominions of Frederic; not a limit to the boundaries of any state was contracted or advanced. Europe, in its territorial divisions, remained exactly as before. But in Asia and America how was the world changed! The num In Asia, the victories of Clive at Plassey, of Coote at the Wandiwash, and of Watson and Pococke on the Indian seas, had given England the undoubted ascendency in the East Indies, opening to her suddenly the promise of untold treasures and territorial acquisitions without end. In America, the Teutonic race, with its strong tendency to individuality and freedom, was become the master from the Gulf of Mexico to the poles; and the English tongue, which, but a century and a half before, had for its entire world a part only of two narrow islands on the outer verge of Europe, was now to spread more widely than any that had ever given expression to human thought. Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country, take possession of the North Ameri can continent! Gladden the waste places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for man! Give an echo to the now silent and solitary mountains; gush out with the fountains, that as yet sing their anthems all day long without response; fill the valleys with the voices of love in its purity, the pledges of friendship in its faithfulness; and as the morning sun drinks the dewdrops from the flowers all the way from the dreary Atlan tic to the Peaceful Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early industry of freemen! Utter boldly and spread widely through the world the thoughts of the coming apostles of the people's liberty, till the sound that cheers the desert shall thrill through the heart of humanity, and the lips of the messenger of the people's power, as he stands in beauty upon the mountains, shall proclaim the renovating tidings of equal freedom for the race! England enjoyed the glory of extended dominion, in the confident expectation of a boundless increase of wealth. But its success was due to its having taken the lead in the good old struggle for liberty; and was destined to bring fruits not so much to itself as to the cause of freedom and mankind. France, of all the states on the continent of Europe, the most powerful by territorial unity, wealth, numbers, industry, and culture, seemed also, by its place, marked out for maritime ascendency. Set between many seas, it rested upon the Mediterranean, possessed harbors on the German Ocean, and embraced within its wide shores and jutting headlands the bays and open waters of the Atlantic; its people, infolding at one extreme the offspring of colonists from Greece, and at the other the hardy children of the Northmen, were called, as it were, to the inheritance of life upon the sea. The nation, too, readily conceived or appro priated great ideas, and delighted in bold resolves. Its travellers had penetrated farthest into the fearful interior of unknown lands; its missionaries won most familiarly the confidence of the aboriginal hordes; its writers described with keener and wiser observation the forms of nature in her wildness, and the habits and languages of savage man; its soldiers, and every lay Frenchman in America owed military service, uniting beyond all others celerity with courage, knew best how to endure the hardships of forest life and to triumph in forest warfare. Its ocean chivalry had given a name to Carolina, and its merchants a people to Acadia. The French discovered the basin of the St. Lawrence, were the first to explore and possess the banks of the Mississippi, and planned an American empire that should unite the widest valleys and most copious inland waters of the world. But New France was governed exclusively by the monarchy of its metropolis; and was shut against the intellectual daring of its philosophy, the liberality of its political economists, the movements of its industrial genius, its legal skill, and its infusion of Protestant freedom. Nothing representing the new activity of thought in modern France went to America; nothing had leave to go there but what was old and worn out. The government thought only to transmit to its American empire the exhausted polity of the middle ages; the castes of feudal Europe; its monarchy, its hierarchy, its nobility, and its dependent peasantry; while commerce was enfeebled by protection, stifled under the weight of inconvenient regulations, and fettered by exclusive grants. The land was parcelled out in seigniories; and, though quit-rents were moderate, transfers and sales of leases were burdened with restrictions and heavy fines. The men who held the plough were tenants and vassals, of whom few could either write or read. No village school was open for their instruction; nor was there one printing-press in either Canada or Louisiana. The central will of the administration, though checked by concessions of monopolies, was neither guided by local legislatures nor restrained by parliaments or courts of law. But France was reserved for a nobler influence in the New World than that of propagating institutions which in the Old World were giving up the ghost; nor had Providence set apart America for the reconstruction of the decaying framework of feudal tyranny. The colonists from England brought over the forms of the government of the mother country, and the purpose of giving them a better development and a fairer career in the western world. The French emigrants took with them only what belonged to the past, and nothing that represented modern freedom. The English emigrants retained what they called English privileges, but left behind in the parent country English inequalities, the monarch and nobility and prelacy. French America was closed against even a gleam of intellectual independence, nor did it contain so much as one dissenter from the Roman church; English America had English liberties in greater purity and with far more of the power of the people than England. Its inhabitants were self-organized bodies of freeholders, pressing upon the receding forests, winning their way farther and farther every year, and never going back. They had schools, so that in several of the colonies there was no one to be found, beyond childhood, who could not read and write; they had the printing-press, scattering among them books and pamphlets and many newspapers; they had a ministry chiefly composed of men of their own election. In private life, they were accustomed to take care of themselves; in public affairs, they had local legislatures and municipal selfdirection. And now this continent, from the Gulf of Mexico to where civilized life is stayed by barriers of frost, was become their dwelling-place and their heritage. Reasoning men in New York, as early as 1748, foresaw and announced that the conquest of Canada, by relieving the northern colonies from danger, would hasten their emancipation. An attentive Swedish traveller in that year heard the opinion, and published it to Sweden and to Europe; the early dreams of John Adams made the removal of "the turbulent Gallics a prelude to the approaching greatness of his country. During the negotiations for peace, the kinsman and bosom friend of Edmund Burke |