The collision which had taken place could not have been much longer postponed. The English colonies had grown much more rapidly than the French. They were more prosperous. There was a spirit of enterprise among them which was difficult to crush. They could not tamely see themselves hemmed in upon the Atlantic coast and cut off from access to the interior of the continent by a colony whose inhabitants did not count a tenth part of their own numbers, and with whom hostility seemed an hereditary necessity. It mattered not whether the rights of discovery and prior occupation, asserted by the French, constituted, according to the law of nations, a title more or less sound than that which the English claimed through Indian tribes whom the French had by treaty recognized as British subjects. The title held by the strongest side would be better than the title based upon international law. Events had already anticipated politics. The importance of the Ohio Valley to the English colonies as an outlet to their growing population had been forced upon their attention. To the French, who were just becoming accustomed to its use as a highway for communication between Canada and Louisiana, the growth of the latter colony was a daily instruction as to its value. * * * * * The Louisiana which thus helped to bring the French face to face with their great rivals was described by Charlevoix as “the name which M. de La Salle gave to that portion of the country watered by the Mississippi which lies below the River Illinois.” This definition limits Louisiana to the Valley of the Mississippi; but the French cartographers of the middle of the eighteenth century put no boundary to the pretensions of their country in the vague regions of the West, concerning which tradition, story, and fable were the only sources of information for their charts. The claims of France to this indefinite territory were, however, considered of sufficient importance to be noticed in the document on the Northwestern Boundary question which forms the basis of Greenhow’s _History of Oregon and California_. The French were not disturbed by the pretensions of Spain to a large part of the same territory, although based upon the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto and the actual occupation of Florida. Neither were the charters of those English colonies, which granted territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, regarded as constituting valid claims to this region. France had not deliberately set out to establish a colony here. It was only after they were convinced at Versailles that Coxe, the claimant of the grant of “Carolana,” was in earnest in his attempts to colonize the banks of the Mississippi by way of its mouth, that this determination was reached. As late as the 8th of April, 1699, the Minister of the Marine wrote: “I begin by telling you that the King does not intend at present to form an establishment at the