[Sidenote: Canada was: (1) a continental area; (2) colonized by another European race; (3) bordering on a sphere of British colonization; (4) the home of a coloured race.] The Seven Years’ War brought with it British conquest alike in East and West; but in India the British advance was in some sort a repetition on a wider scale of what other European nations had done in the same regions. It was the natural outcome of trade rivalry, and of white men coming among Eastern races. The conquest of Canada, on the other hand, differed in kind from all that had gone before in British history. The Imperial Government of Great Britain took over a great expanse of continent, and became, by force of arms, proprietor of a country which another colonizing race had acquired by settlement. The new problems were how to administer and to develop not a small island or peninsula but a very large continental area, and how to rule a rival white race which from the beginnings of colonization in North America had made that area, or part of it, its own. To these two most difficult problems was added a third, how to administer the new territory and to rule the French colonists, so as to work in harmony with the adjacent British colonies. Conquest and settlement, so to speak, overlapped. If Canada had not been a French colony, and had been inhabited by coloured men alone, or if Canada, as a French colony, had been in a different continent from the British North American colonies, the task of construction or re-construction would have been infinitely easier. It would have been easier, too, if the French Canadians had been the only inhabitants of Canada. But, as it was, one white race conquered another white race, which in its turn had secured mastery over a coloured race, and in the land of that coloured race had not merely conquered or traded, but settled and colonized; and the new conquerors were of the same kith and kin as settlers in the adjoining territories, whose traditions were all traditions not of ruling nor of conquering so much as of gradually acquiring by settlement at the expense of the coloured race. [Sidenote: Conditions which guided British policy in Canada as embodied in the Proclamation of 1763.] [Sidenote: Geographical division between the settled districts and the hinterland.] [Sidenote: The Indian question.] [Sidenote: Necessity for attracting British colonists]