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Chapter 20:
England, grasping at the colonies of
France and
Spain, risks the loss of her own.—Bute's ministry.
1762-1763.
while it was yet uncertain who among British
statesmen would be selected to establish British authority in the colonies, the king, on the twentysixth of October, offering to return
Havana to
Spain for either the
Floridas or
Porto Rico, urged the instant consummation of the treaty.
‘The best dispatch I can receive from you will be these preliminaries signed.
May Providence, in compassion to human misery, give you the means of executing this great and noble work.’
Thus beautifully wrote the young monarch to
Bedford, not dazzled by victory, and repressing the thirst for conquest; a rare instance of moderation, of which history must gratefully preserve the record.
The terms proposed to the
French were severe, and even humiliating.
‘But what can we do?’
said
Choiseul, who in his despair had for a time resigned the foreign department to the
Duke de Praslin.
‘The
English are furiously imperious; they are drunk with success; and, unfortunately, we are not in a condition to abase their pride.’
France
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yielded to necessity, and on the third day of Novem-
ber the preliminaries of peace, a peace so momentous for
America, were signed between
France and
Spain on the one side, and
England and
Portugal on the other.
To
England were ceded, besides islands in the
West Indies, the
Floridas;
Louisiana to the
Mississippi, but without the island of New Orleans; all
Canada;
Acadia; Cape Breton and its dependent islands; and the fisheries, except that
France retained a share in them, with the two islets St. Pierre and Miquelon, as a shelter for their fishermen.
For the loss of
Florida France on the same day indemnified
Spain by ceding to that power New Orleans, and all
Louisiana west of the
Mississippi, with boundaries undefined.
In
Africa,
England acquired
Senegal, with the command of the slave-trade.
In the
East Indies,
France, according to a modification proposed and insisted upon by
Bedford, only recovered in a dismantled and ruined state the little that she possessed on the first of January, 1749;
England obtained in that region the undoubted sway.
In
Europe, where Frederic was left to take care of himself, each power received back its own; Minorca, therefore, reverted to
Great Britain.
‘
England,’ said the king, ‘never signed such a peace before, nor, I believe, any other power in
Europe.’
‘The country never,’ said the dying
Granville, ‘saw so glorious a war, or so honorable a peace.’
It maintains, thought
Thomas Hollis, no flatterer of kings, the maritime power, the interests, the security, the tranquillity, and the honor of
England.
The
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judgment of mankind, out of
England, then and ever
since, has pronounced on it similar decisions.
For once, to the surprise of every body,
Bute spoke well, rising in its defence in the House of Lords. ‘I wish,’ said he, ‘no better inscription on my tomb than that I was its author.’
On the morning of the ninth of December, the very day on which the preliminaries were to be discussed in parliament,
Charles Townshend resigned his place as secretary at war. The opposition, on his resigning, had great hopes of his joining with them.
But, always preserving intimate relations with George the Third, he still aspired to the management of the plantations as third
secretary of state; and when
Pitt spoke against the peace for three hours and twenty minutes,—for the first hour admirably, then with flagging strength, ‘though even in his scrawls showing the masterly hand of a Raphael,’ and an ‘indisputable superiority to all others,’—
Charles Townshend, in a speech of but twenty-five minutes, made an answer ‘with great judgment, wit, and strength of argument,’ on the side of humanity.
1
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 progress 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.
In the first days of January, 1763, it was publicly
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avowed what had long been resolved on, that a stand-
ing army of twenty battalions was to be kept up in
America after the peace;
2 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 empress 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.
3 To the firm man the moment of deliverance assuredly comes.
Deserted most unexpectedly by George the Third, the changes in
Russia had been equally marvellous.
That empire from an enemy had become an ally, desirable from its strength, yet dangerous from the indiscretions of its sovereign.
But when the arbitrary seizure of the domains of the
Russian clergy by Peter the Third, and the introduction into the army of an unwonted 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
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she was held to be the ablest person in its court;—was
advanced, over the ruin of her husband, of which she was not guilty, to the imperial throne of the Czars.
More wise than her predecessor, she abandoned his 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 win 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.
The number 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
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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!
In
Asia, the victories of
Clive at Plassy, of
Coote at the Wanderwash, 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 American 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
Atlantic to the
Peaceful Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early industry of freemen!
Utter boldly and spread widely through the world
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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 exulted in its conquests; enjoying the glory of extended dominion in the confident expectation of a boundless increase of wealth.
But its success was due to its haying 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 appropriated 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,
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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 and a colony 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 seignories; and though quitrents 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
Canada4 or
Louisiana.
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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.
5
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 forward 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
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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 self-direction.
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, employed the
British press to unfold the danger to
England from retaining
Canada; and the
French minister for foreign affairs frankly warned the
British envoy, that the cession of
Canada would lead to the independence of
North America.
6
Unintimidated by the prophecy, and obeying a higher and wiser instinct,
England happily persisted.
‘We have caught them at last,’
7 said
Choiseul to those around him on the definitive surrender of New France; and at once giving up
Louisiana to
Spain, his eager hopes anticipated the speedy struggle of
America for separate existence.
So soon as the sagacious
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and experienced
Vergennes, the
French ambassador at
Constantinople, a grave, laborious man, remarkable for a calm temper and moderation of character, heard the conditions of the peace, he also said to his friends, and even openly to a British traveller,
8 ‘the consequences of the entire cession of
Canada are obvious.
I am persuaded,’ and afterwards he himself recalled his prediction to the notice of the
British ministry,
9— ‘
England will ere long repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no longer in need of her protection; she will call on them to contribute towards supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her; and they will answer by striking off all dependence.’
Lord Mansfield, also, used often to declare that he too, ‘ever since the peace of
Paris, always thought the
Northern Colonies were meditating a state of independency on
Great Britain.
10’
The colonial system, being founded on injustice, was at war with itself.
The principle which confined the commerce of each colony to its own metropolis, was not only introduced by
England into its domestic legislation, but was accepted as the law of nations in its treaties with other powers; so that while it wantonly restrained its colonists, it was jealously, and on its own theory rightfully excluded from the rich possessions of
France and
Spain.
Those regions could be thrown open to British traders, only by the general abrogation of the mercantile monopoly, which would extend the benefit to universal commerce, or by
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British conquest, which would close them once more
against all the world but the victors; even against the nations which had discovered and planted them.
Leaving the nobler policy of liberty to find its defenders where it could, and wilfully, and as it were fatally blind to what would follow,
England chose the policy of conquest and exclusion; and had already acquired much of the empire of
Spain in
America, and nearly the whole of that of
France in both hemispheres.
The balance of the colonial system was destroyed for ever; there existed no longer the community of interest for its support on the part of the great maritime powers of
Europe.
The Seven Years War which doubled the debt of
England, increasing it to seven hundred millions of dollars, had been begun by her for the possession of the
Ohio Valley.
She achieved that conquest, but not for herself.
Driven out from its share in the great colonial system,
France was swayed by its own commercial and political interests, by its wounded pride, and by that enthusiasm which the support of a good cause enkindles, to take up the defence of the freedom of the seas, and heartily to desire the enfranchisement of the
English plantations.
This policy was well devised; and we shall see that
England became not so much the possessor of the
Valley of the
West, as the transient trustee, commissioned to transfer it from the France of the
Middle Ages to the free people, who were making for humanity a new existence in
America.
end of volume IV.
