George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 3, 15th edition.

[176] unfriendly to change. She had encroached on every

Chap. XXI.}

neighbor; and fear, and a sense of wrong, made all of them her enemies. From regard to the integrity of its territory, the German empire, with Austria, joined with England; and, as the Spanish Netherlands, which constituted the barrier of Holland and Germany against France, and the path of England into the heart of the continent, could be saved from conquest by France only through the interposition of England and Holland, an alliance followed between the Protestant revolutionary republic and monarchy, on the one side, and the bigoted defender of the Roman Catholic church and legitimacy, on the other. Hence, also, in the first war of King William, the frontiers of Carolina, bordering on the possessions of Spain, were safe against invasion: Spain and England were allies.

Thus the war of 1689, in Europe, roused Louis XIV. in behalf of legitimacy, and, at the same time, rallied against him, not England only, but every power which dreaded his lawless ambition. William III. was not only the defender of the nationality of England, but of the territorial freedom of Europe.

In the colonies, the strife was, on behalf of their respective mother countries, for the fisheries, and for territory at the north and west. The idea of weakening an adversary, by encouraging its colonies to assert independence, did not, at that time, exist; the universal maxim of European statesmen assumed the fact, that colonies have a master. In the contests that followed, the religious faith, and the roving enterprise of the French Canadians, secured to Louis XIV. their active support. The English colonists, on the contrary, sided heartily with England: the English revolution was to them the pledge for freedom of mind, as