France to the frontier posts upon the lakes or by the far-away western rivers. The St. Lawrence was closed for nearly half the year by ice; and it was a weary task to get any boat up the stream of the endless Mississippi against its slow tide of waters and through the puzzling, shifting channels of its winding course. The Marquis Duquesne had called the Iroquois to a council in 1754, ere he left his governorship, and had commended his sovereign’s government to them because of this very difference between French and English. “Are you ignorant,” he said, “of the difference between the King of England and the King of France? Go, see the forts that our King has established, and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night.” Perhaps Duquesne, being a soldier and no statesman, did not realize all that this difference meant. The French posts, with the forests close about them, were not self-supporting communities such as everywhere filled the English dominion. Their governors were soldiers, their inhabitants a garrison, the few settlers near at hand traders, not husbandmen, or at best mere tenants of the crown of France. No doubt it was easier for the savages to approach and trade with them; but it would turn out to be infinitely harder for the French to keep them. Their occupants had struck no deep rootage into the soil they were seated upon, as the English had. Englishmen themselves had noted, with some solicitude, how slow their own progress was away from the sea-coast. It was not until 1725 that settlers in Massachusetts had ventured to go so far away from the Bay as the Berkshire Hills. “Our country has now been inhabited more than one hundred and thirty years,” exclaimed Colonel Byrd, of Virginia, in 1729, “and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have ranged from Quebec southward as far as the mouth of the Mississippi, in the Bay of Mexico, and to the west almost as far as California, which is either way above two thousand miles.” But Colonel Byrd was thinking of discovery, not of settlement; the search for minerals and the natural wealth of the forests, not the search for places to which to extend permanent homes and government. The difference arose out of the fundamental unlikeness of French and English, both in life and in government. [Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]