But, taking the main events which contributed to the security and greatness of the American colonies, how far should they be credited to Great Britain and how far to the colonies themselves? In earlier days, nothing was more important to the future of the English in America than securing a continuous seaboard and linking the southern to the northern colonies. This object was obtained by taking New York from the Dutch, the result of action initiated in Europe, not in America. The final reduction of Port Royal was effected with the assistance of troops and ships from England. The Peace of Utrecht, which deprived the French of Acadia and their settlements in Newfoundland, was, as already stated, wholly the result of Marlborough’s fighting in Europe. Though the New Englanders took Louisbourg, and England gave it back to France, the colonists’ success was largely aided by Warren’s squadron of Imperial ships. But, most of all, the final conquest of Canada was due far more to the action of the mother country than to that of the colonies. The great, almost the only, foreign danger to the English colonies in North America was from the French in Canada and Louisiana, but it is not generally realized how enormously the English on the North American continent outnumbered the French. At the time of the conquest of Canada, the white population of the English colonies in North America was to that of the French colonies as thirteen to one. It is true that the English did not form one community, whereas the French were united; but it is also true, on the other hand, that the several English communities were more concentrated than the French, and that they held the base of the triangle, which base was the sea. A single one of the larger English colonies had a white population equal to or surpassing the whole French population in North America. Under these circumstances it might fairly be asked why the English colonists required any help at all from the mother country to conquer Canada. The war was one in which they were vitally concerned. Its object was to give present security to their frontiers, to rid them once for all from the raids of French and Indians, which had for generations desolated their villages, farms, and homesteads, and to leave the West as a heritage to their children’s children, instead of allowing the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio to remain a French preserve. No doubt it was to the interest of Great Britain, as an Imperial Power, that France should be attacked and, if possible, overthrown in the New World as in the Old. The conquest of Canada was part of Pitt’s general scheme of policy, and English regiments were not sent to America for the sake of the American colonists alone.[28] But the allegation made in after years, that the campaigns in America were of great concern to the mother country and of little concern to the American colonies, was on the face of it untrue. To the