What made for keeping up the connexion with the mother country was not so much what the mother country did for the colonies in peace, as the need which the colonies had for the mother country in case of war. An attempt has been made in the preceding chapters of this book to show that good fortune has attended Canada in her development into a nation. The conquest by Great Britain tended to this end, so did the loss by Great Britain of the provinces which now form the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the cloud of war hung over Canada, but still her good fortune did not desert her. There was perpetual danger from two quarters, from France and from the United States. With France Canada, as being part of the British Empire, was nominally at open war throughout the closing years of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, except for the very short interval which followed the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens in 1802; but it is noteworthy how the political complications inured to the preservation of Canada as a British possession. France and the United States had strong bonds of sympathy. To French intervention the United States largely owed their independence. Having parted with their monarchy, the French were more attractive than before to the citizens of the American republic; and in the days of the American revolutionary war Congress had pledged itself to defend for ever the French possessions in America. The bulk of the Canadians, French in race, tradition, language and religion, might well be expected to be French in sympathies. How great then might have seemed the probability that England in war with France would lose Canada? It was no wonder that such incidents as a visit of Jerome Bonaparte to the United States caused uneasiness, or again that a report was spread that Moreau, the French republican general then living in exile in America, was likely to lead an invasion of Canada. [Sidenote: French Canadians not in sympathy with the French Revolution.] But, as a matter of fact, neither were the Canadians inclined to return to their French allegiance nor were the people of the United States in the least likely to permit France to regain Canada. The Canadians had known forty years of British rule, clean and just in comparison with what had gone before, and the France which would reclaim them was widely different from the France to which they had once belonged. The King was gone; religion was at a discount; Canadian sympathies, at any rate in the earlier years of the revolutionary wars, were rather with Royalist _emigrés_ than with the national armies who went on from victory to victory. Above all antipathy to the United States, without whose abetting or connivance, no French projects for regaining Canada could have effect, tended to keep the Canadians firm in their British allegiance. Thus the news of the victory of Trafalgar was welcomed in Canada.