The French power, which he chiefly feared, had really grown very menacing in America; was growing more so every year; and must very soon indeed be faced and overcome, if the English were not to be shut in to a narrow seaboard, or ousted altogether. It was not a question of numbers. It was a question of territorial aggrandizement, rather, and strategic advantage. Probably there were not more than twelve thousand Frenchmen, all told, in America when William became King (1689); whereas his own subjects swarmed there full two hundred thousand strong, and were multiplying by the tens of thousands from decade to decade. But the French were building military posts at every strategic point as they went, while the English were building nothing but rural homes and open villages. With the French it did not seem a matter of settlement; it seemed a matter of conquest, rather, and of military occupation. They were guarding trade routes and making sure of points of advantage. The English way was the more wholesome and the more vital. A hardy, self-dependent, crowding people like the English in Massachusetts and Virginia, and the Dutch in New York, took root wherever they went, spread into real communities, and were not likely to be got rid of when once their number had run into the thousands. Their independence, too, and their capable way of managing their own affairs without asking or wanting or getting any assistance from government, made them as hard to handle as if they had been themselves an established continental power. But the French had an advantage, nevertheless, which was not to be despised. They moved as they were ordered to move by an active and watchful government which was in the thick of critical happenings where policies were made, and which meant to cramp the English, if it could not actually get rid of them. They extended and organized the military power of France as they went; and they were steadily girdling the English about with a chain of posts and settlements which bade fair to keep all the northern and western regions of the great continent for the King of France, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence round about, two thousand miles, to the outlets of the Mississippi at the Gulf. [Illustration: NEW ORLEANS IN 1719]