But for the colonies in America it was only “Queen Anne’s War,” full of anxiety, suffering, and disappointment,—massacres on the border, expeditions to the north blundered and mismanaged, money and lives spent with little to show for the sacrifice. The ministers at home had made no preparation in America for the renewal of hostilities. There had been warnings enough, and appeals of deep urgency, sent out of the colonies. Every observant man of affairs there saw what must come. But warnings and appeals had not been heeded. Lord Bellomont, that self-respecting gentleman and watchful governor, had told the ministers at home very plainly that there ought to be a line of frontier posts at the north, with soldiers for colonists, and that simply to pursue the Indians once and again to the depths of the forests was as useless “as to pursue birds that are on the wing.” An English prisoner in the hands of the French had sent word what he heard they meant to do for the extension of their boundaries and their power. The deputy governor of Pennsylvania had proposed a colonial militia to be kept at the frontier. Certain private gentlemen of the northern settlements had begged for a common governor “of worth and honor,” and for some system of common defence. Mr. Penn, looking on near at hand, had advised that the colonists be drawn together in intercourse and interest by a common coinage, a common rule of citizenship, a common system of justice, and by duties on foreign timber which would in some degree offset the burdens of the Navigation Acts,—as well as by common organization and action against the French and against the pirates of the coast. But nothing had been done. [Illustration: FRENCH HUGUENOT CHURCH, NEW YORK, 1704] Even the little that had been gained in King William’s War had now to be gained all over again. Sir William Phips had taken Port Royal very handily at the outset of that war (1690), and Acadia with it, and there had been no difficulty in holding the conquered province until the war ended; but the treaty of Ryswick had handed back to the French everything the English had taken, the statesmen of England hardly heeding America at all in the terms they agreed to,—and so a beginning was once more to be made.