It was said of the Spartans that warring was their salvation and ruling was their ruin. The saying holds true of various peoples and races in history. A militant race has often proved to be deficient in the qualities which ensure stable, just, and permanent government; and in such cases, when peace supervenes on war, an era of decline and fall begins for those whom fighting has made great. But even when a conquering race has capacity for government, there come times in its career when Aristotle’s dictum in part holds good. It applied, to some extent, to the English in North America. As long as they were faced by the French on the western continent, common danger and common effort held the mother country and the colonies together. Security against a foreign foe brought difficulties which ended in civil war, and the Peace of 1763 was the beginning of dissolution. In the present chapter, which covers the history of Canada from the Peace of Paris to the outbreak of the War of Independence, it is proposed, from the point of view of colonization, to examine the ultimate rather than the immediate causes which led to England losing her old North American colonies, while she retained her new possession of Canada. [Sidenote: Prophecies that the British conquest of Canada would be followed by the loss of the North American colonies. Peter Kalm.] It had been abundantly prophesied that the outcome of British conquest of Canada would be colonial independence in British North America. In the years 1748-50 the Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled through the British North American colonies and Canada, and left on record his impressions of the feeling towards the mother country which existed at the time in the British provinces. Noting the great increase in these colonies of riches and population, and the growing coolness towards Great Britain, produced at once by commercial restrictions and by the presence among the English colonists of German, Dutch, and French settlers, he arrived at the conclusion that the proximity of a rival and hostile power in Canada was the main factor in keeping the British colonies under the British Crown. ‘The English Government,’ he wrote, ‘has therefore sufficient reason to consider the French in North America as the best means of keeping the colonies in their due submission.’[16] Others wrote or spoke to the same effect. Montcalm was credited with having prophesied the future before he shared the fall of Canada,[17] and another prophet was the French minister Choiseul, when negotiating the Peace of Paris. To keen, though not always unprejudiced, observers the signs of the times betokened coming conflicts between Great Britain and her colonies; and to us now looking back on history, wise after the event, it is evident that the end of foreign war in North America meant the beginning of troubles within what was then the circle of the British Empire.