By this time French traders had set foot on every shore of the great lakes and explored nearly every stream tributary thereto. The English, pushing westward more and more, were trying to divide with them the lucrative business of fur-trading, and each nation sought to win to itself all the Indians it could. The Mohawks and their confederates of the Five Nations, now equipped and acquainted with fire-arms, spite of alternate overtures and threats from the French, remained firm friends to the English, who more and more invaded those vast and fertile western ranges. It grew to be the great question of the age this side the Atlantic, whether England or France should control the continent. King William's war, declared in 1689, was therefore certain to rage in America as well as in Europe. [Illustration: Signature of D'Iberville.] One sees by a glance at the map what advantage France had in this struggle. It possessed the best fishing grounds and fur-producing districts, and fish and furs were at first the only exports of value from the north of America. The French, too, held all the water-ways to the heart of the continent. Coming up Lake Champlain they could threaten New York and New England from the rear. The colonies farther south they shut in almost as straitly, French bullets whistling about any Englishman's ears the instant he appeared beyond the mountains. In other respects England had the advantage. In population English America had become as superior as French America was territorially, having 1,116,000 white inhabitants in 1750, to about 80,000 French. The English colonies were also more convenient to the mother-country, and the better situated for commerce both coastwise and across the ocean. Among the English, temper for mere speculation and adventure decayed very early, giving way to the conviction that successful planting depended wholly upon persistent, energetic toil. A piece of fortune more important yet was their relatively free religious and political system. Toleration in religion was large. Self-government was nearly complete internally, and indeed externally, till the navigation acts. Canada, on the other hand, was oppressed by a feudal constitution in the state, settlers being denied the fee simple of their lands, and by Jesuits in Church. "New France could not grow," says Parkman, "with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him. In making Canada a citadel of the state religion, the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a transatlantic empire." Thus the Huguenots, France's best emigrants to America, did not come to New France, but to New England and the other Protestant colonies. [Illustration: The Attack on Schenectady.]