It was in the closing years of the great experiment that France devised the bold conception of establishing a line of military settlements on the Mississippi as well as on the St. Lawrence,[16] and thus confining the English between the Alleghany Mountains and the sea. In view of the extreme inferiority of her strength, the project seems extravagant. It was utterly impossible to restrain, by any forces which France could command, the expansive energy of the English colonies. There were sixty thousand Frenchmen proposing to imprison on the sea-coast two million Englishmen. But the constitution of the French settlements, while it enfeebled them and unfitted them to cope with their rivals in peaceful growth, made them formidable beyond their real strength for purposes of aggression. Canada was a military settlement; every Canadian was a soldier, bound to follow to the field his feudal lord. The English colonists were peaceful farmers or traders; they were widely scattered, and living as they did under many independent governments, their combination for any common warlike purpose was almost impossible. That they should ultimately overthrow the dominion of their rivals was inevitable; but if the French King had been able to reinforce more liberally the arms of his Canadian subjects, the contest must have been prolonged and bloody. Happily, his resources were taxed to the utmost by the complications which surrounded him at home. The question as to which race should be supreme on the American continent was helped to a speedy solution on the battle-fields of the Seven Years’ War. CHAPTER VII. AFTER THE CONQUEST. The condition of the Canadian people at the time of the conquest by the English was exceedingly miserable. Every man was in the ranks, and the fields on which their maintenance depended lay untilled. The lucrative fur trade had ceased, for the Indian hunter and the French trader were fighting against the English. The scanty revenues of the colony no longer yielded support to the officers of the Government, who plundered the wretched people without restraint of pity or of shame. Famine prevailed, and found many victims among the women and children, who were now the occupants of the neglected clearings along the river-banks.