Thus three separate raids on the English colonies, sent out under Frontenac's orders in the year 1690, were all successful. They were well devised, and carried out with skill, courage, and determination. The English and Dutch settlers, on their side, showed the greatest negligence and little stubbornness or competence in self-defence. The immediate result was to invigorate the French and their Indian allies; but the causes of their momentary success were the causes of their ultimate failure; and even at the moment these marauding exploits threatened new danger to Canada. The French succeeded because, leagued with savages, they in all things likened themselves to their companions, they habited themselves in Indian dress, their warriors were ferocious as Indian warriors, their priests hounded on to blood. They succeeded because their trade was war not peace, {130} because they were roving adventurers who had only their lives to lose, ravening among quiet men of substance who had homes and wives and children to be plundered and slain. It was as certain that in course of time the cause of the English colonists would prevail, as that the Highland clans, who in Scotland marauded their southern neighbours, would eventually be broken, or that the Five Nations themselves, if left to fight alone, would eventually go down before the settled life of Canada. [Sidenote: _They tended to unite the English colonists._] On this occasion three blows were struck, nearly at the same time, at three separate points in a long undefended line. The adoption of this policy by the French, and still more the fact of its success, in reality tended to remove the one great obstacle to British supremacy in North America. When Sylvanus Davies, taken at Fort Loyal and carried prisoner to Quebec, asked Frontenac the reason for the savage raid on the Casco Bay settlement, he was told that it was reprisal for the support given to the Iroquois by New York. His rejoinder, which was to the effect that New England should not be called upon to answer for the doings of New York, showed how little community of sentiment or interest existed in the English colonies. The one great source of weakness to the English cause, the greatest source of strength to the French, was the disunion of the English colonies and their indifference to each other. Consolidation could come only through partnership in suffering, and pressure from a common foe. This was the lesson which Frontenac taught, when his border ruffians carried havoc from the head waters of the Hudson to the sea-coast of Maine. [Sidenote: _The colonies determine to attack Canada._]