After that the rest of the task was simple enough. The next year Montreal was yielded up, all Canada passed into the hands of the English, and the war was practically over. There were yet three more years to wait before formal peace should be concluded, because the nations of Europe did not decide their affairs by the issue of battles and sieges in America; but for the English colonies the great struggle was ended. By the formal peace, signed in 1763, at Paris, England gained Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and all the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the river and harbor of Mobile, and all the disputed lands of the continent, north and south, between the eastern mountain ranges and mid-stream of the Mississippi, except New Orleans,—besides the free navigation of the great river. From Spain she got Florida. France had the year before (1762) ceded to Spain her province of “Louisiana,” the great region beyond the Mississippi, whose extent and boundaries no man could tell. She was utterly stripped of her American possessions, and the English might look forward to a new age in their colonies. The general _authorities_ for the condition of the country and the movement of affairs during this period are the well known histories of Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; the third volume of J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_; the third volume of J. G. Palfrey’s _Compendious History of New England_; W. B. Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_; Mr. Barrett Wendell’s _Cotton Mather_; Mr. Eben G. Scott’s _Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America_; C. W. Baird’s _Huguenot Emigration to America_; James Russell Lowell’s _New England Two Centuries Ago_, in his _Among My Books_; Mr. Brooks Adams’s _Emancipation of Massachusetts_; Madame Knight’s _Journal_ (1704); John Fontaine’s _Diary_, in the _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and Benjamin Franklin’s _Autobiography_. A more particular account of many of the transactions that fell within the period may be found in Justin Winsor’s _New England, 1689-1763_, in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_; Berthold Fernow’s _Middle Colonies_, Justin Winsor’s _Maryland and Virginia_, and William J. Rivers’s _The Carolinas_, in the same volume of Winsor; Charles C. Smith’s _The Wars on the Seaboard: Acadia and Cape Breton_, and Justin Winsor’s _Struggle for the Great Valleys of North America_, in the same volume of Winsor.