For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction. ----- [4] Letter to the writer, Feb. 7, 1890. CHAPTER IV. THE STRUGGLE FOR A CONTINENT. FOR the possession of the North American continent two nations, France and England, representing the two civilizations, Roman and Teutonic, which dominate respectively Southern and Northern Europe, contended. France, in America, embodied the Roman or more ancient type of civilization, in which government and order were represented by the priest and the soldier, while the people had little or nothing to do with the government, except to obey. External authority was everything; inward condition, little or nothing. The French system was not that of real colonization, but of military possession; and the desired form of social and political order was that based on monarchy and feudalism. In the despotism of a Church subordinate to a ruler in Italy, and of a State represented by a monarch, the individual was lost, and the people’s function was simply to submit and pay taxes. They were taught to look upon their privileges and enjoyments as the gifts of the sovereign and of the Church. Authority emanated from the government, which represented God, and represented Him infallibly. The English colonists, whose leaders had been largely trained in the Dutch Republic, represented the best elements of Teutonic civilization, those of English blood being more English than the Englishmen left behind, and more Teutonic than the Germans. Most of the principles and institutions wrought out in the experience of the colonists, especially those now seen to be most peculiarly American, were not of British, but of continental origin. New England was settled mostly by immigrants who had left England before 1640; and nearly all their leaders had come by way of Holland, receiving their political and military education in the United States of Holland, and under its red, white, and blue flag.