In the case of North America, while French and English were competing there, the English through their Government acted as they always have acted, during the whole course of their foreign and colonial history. They did, they undid, they compromised, until at length in Pitt there came a man who gripped the nettle, and the end was reached which might with infinitely greater ease have been attained many years before. When Quebec was in its infancy, the English under Kirke conquered it; the English King gave it back, and then the French dominion in North America took root. After Marlborough's wars the Peace of Utrecht gave Acadia to England, but gave it in terms so vague that the French continued to claim much or most of it; at the same time it left Cape Breton Island to France, and sowed the seeds of an apparently perennial controversy between Great Britain and France with regard to fishing rights on the coast of Newfoundland. There was more war, and the colonists took Cape Breton Island. Under the terms of the next treaty the English Government restored it to France. Then came the final war and the final peace; England gained all Canada, but, with that strange liking which Englishmen seem to have for leaving a frayed end in their treaty arrangements, the British Government confirmed the fishing rights of France on the Newfoundland coast, and added thereto possession of the two small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. It was not policy, it was not system, which gave North America to the English rather than to the French, and yet there was a certain gain even from the utter absence of both policy and system. Natural forces had more play on the English side than on the French, and in a sense it might {347} be said of the English colonies that their strength was to sit still. [Sidenote: _Was the contest between Great Britain and France in North America inevitable and beneficial?_] The last question to be asked, and if possible to be answered, is: Was the contest between France and Great Britain in North America, and the victory of one of the two powers, inevitable, and was it beneficial? From the English point of view, the answer to part of this question is a foregone conclusion. If there was to be a contest, it seems evident, if we look back on the past, that the English must have in the end prevailed. It is impossible to imagine that the French colony of Canada, with a population at the time of the conquest of considerably under 100,000, could dominate the English colonies with a million and a quarter inhabitants. Equally certain does it appear that to Canada the British conquest was a blessing in disguise, and the Canadians in a very short time realized what they had gained by the change of administration. In Mr. Parkman's words, 'a happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms.'[12] [Footnote 12: _The Old Régime in Canada_ (end).]