8. Such slow progress did New France make, notwithstanding King Louis's tender care, that on his death, in 1715, the whole colony was in the depths of poverty and numbered only 25,000 souls, whereas the English colonists in America were at that date ten times as numerous, and lived in the midst of plenty. The former depended on Government aid, the latter on themselves. (4) RIPENING FOR WAR. 1. The treaty of Utrecht (1713) left Britain at the commencement of a long period of peace and prosperity. During that quiet period we have little that is interesting to tell. Britain was quietly growing in wealth and power, and her colonies in population and importance. By the census of 1754 it appeared that the British colonists, occupying a strip of territory about 200 miles in width along the Atlantic coasts, numbered upwards of a million souls; whereas at that date, the whole white population under the French flag in North America did not exceed 80,000. 2. Though the French settlers were so few, France laid claim to all America from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay. They claimed it by right of discovery and partial occupation. It was her explorers who first made their way down the Mississippi, her missionaries who first visited the Indian tribes of the interior, her traders who first opened a market with the natives. But the French had hardly occupied any part of that vast region south of the Great Lakes. It is true they had founded Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi and partly colonized Louisiana; but between the delta of that river and the St. Lawrence there was still a vast wilderness, the home of the bison and beaver, where the Indian trapped and hunted, with here and there a French trading post or mission station. 3. "French America," says the historian of Canada, "had two heads,--one among the snows of Canada, and one among the cane-breaks of Louisiana; one communicating with the world through the gulf of St. Lawrence, and the other through the Gulf of Mexico. These vital points were feebly connected by a chain of military posts, circling through the wilderness nearly three thousand miles. Midway between Canada and Louisiana lay the valley of the Ohio. If the English should seize it, they would sever the chain of posts and cut French America asunder." And this they seemed now (1754) on the point of doing.