No Hopes for the Millennium in American Colonies up to 1754.—More Swords than Ploughshares.—Mars in America.—Sixteen Indian Wars in 147 Years.—How they were fed by French Oil and blown by French Bellows.—The Five Great Continental Wars, and how they reached over and handled the Colonies.—The Treaty Patches, and how they failed to cover the War Breaches.—The Volcanic Character of American Soil.—How the Animosities of France and England grew through Four Centuries, and in what a Hateful Harvest they waved, in 1754, each Side the Sea.—Celebrated Fights between the Rivals in Europe.—How Commercial Competition rubbed in Salt Water, and Religious Differences Brimstone, into the Wounds.—Memorable Cases of Battle Surgery.—The Relative Merits of English and French Claims to America fully stated.—Deeds of Land and of Arms clash.—French Jesuits with Crosses and Traders with Skins encompass the English Plantations from Maine to Minnesota, and thence to Alabama and Texas.—Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Lallemand and others.—The Former escaped the Fast Life of Chicago, and La Salle the Hazards of Natchez.—France seeks to fasten a Remarkable Rosary around the Neck of Young America; England to cut it.—Suitors to the same Maiden, they suited not her nor each other.—Their soft Ways to her.—Their Hardness to each other.—Their Long Quarrels over her Person and Purse result at last in a Decisive Fight.—The Championship for the American Belt.—The Champions, the Belt, and the Ring described.—How John Bull and Jean Crapeau stepped into the Latter.—The Nine Rounds from 1754 to 1763.—How Mr. Bull won; what he said, and how Monsieur Crapeau behaved.—A Suitor pleased, and a Suitor non-suited. The American colonists up to 1754 could not well entertain, from their own experience, any well-founded hopes of the speedy advent of the millennium, when meek-eyed Peace is to hold the good reapers—McCormicks or others—beaten out from ugly swords, and when war is to be banished somewhere, probably to that red-faced Mars, whose vulgar manners, bricky hair, and swaggering gait have not unfrequently brought him into disgrace with his neighbors, particularly with the touchy Venus, and sometimes put him into an eclipse with that steady-going old tramper, the Earth. But somehow, in spite of his disreputable antecedents, Mars had contrived to acquire a very strong influence over that part of our planet occupied by the thirteen Colonies, from the time of the very first settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, throughout all the century and a half which followed. Over that tract of time, their march along the highway of life was like an Irish landlord’s visit to his own estate,—armed, grim, and hostilely interrogative of all who approached. Like his, their advance, too, was “Per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso.”