The chief _authorities_ for the settlement and early history of _Georgia_ are Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; Charles C. Jones’s _History of Georgia_ and _English Colonization of Georgia_ in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_; W. E. H. Lecky’s _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_; Alexander Hewatt’s _Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia_, in Carroll’s _Historical Collections of South Carolina_; the first and second volumes of Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers relating to the Colonies in North America_; and the _Colonial Acts_ of Georgia. CHAPTER II THE PARTING OF THE WAYS No one who marked how the English colonies had grown, and how the French had lagged in the effectual settlement and mastery of the regions they had taken, could wonder that in the final struggle for supremacy the English had won and the French lost everything there was to fight for. The French had been as long on the continent as the English, and yet they did not have one-tenth the strength of the English, either in population or in wealth, when this war came. There were fifty-five thousand white colonists in Canada, all told; and only twenty-five thousand more in all the thin line of posts and hamlets which stretched from the St. Lawrence through the long valley of the Mississippi to the Gulf,—eighty thousand in all. In the English settlements there were more than a million colonists (1,160,000), not scattered in separated posts set far apart in the forested wilderness, but clustered thick in towns and villages, or in neighborly plantations, where the forest had been cleared away, roads made, and trade and peace established. The English had been seeking, not conquest, but comfort and wealth in busy centres and populous country-sides, where their life now ran as strong and as calm, almost, as if they were still in the old lands of England itself. The French, on the contrary, were placed where their government wished them to be; could hardly be said to have formed independent communities at all; and were glad if they could so much as eke out a decent subsistence from the soil, or from food brought by ship from France over sea. The English spread very slowly, considering how fast they came, and kept in some sort a solid mass; but the result was that they thoroughly possessed the country as they went, and made homes, working out a life of their own. The French merely built frontier posts, the while, on the lakes and rivers, as they were bidden or guided or exhorted by their governors; took up such land as was assigned them by royal order; did their daily stint of work, and expected nothing better. They were, moreover, painfully, perilously isolated. Ships could come from England to any part of the English coasts of America in five weeks, whereas it was a good six months’ journey from