France opened the way from east to west. France and England fought for the primacy of the continent, and England won. Defeated France gave up the idea of maintaining herself in America, and secretly ceded to Spain what the war had left her west of the Mississippi, as a bankrupt might convey his property out of the reach of his most pressing creditor. When the Colonies revolted, France saw her way to make them, like the cat in the fable, pull her chestnuts out of the fire. It is no part of a king's trade to set up a republic. France played her own game,[2] played it astutely and to the end. When the Colonies, with her help, achieved their independence, she showed them, much to their wonder, for they were fresh to the tricks of diplomacy, that in politics there is no more friendship than in trade, or rather that politics is a game in which the best player wins. In view of what it had cost her to give up Louisiana, in the first place, not only in loss of territory, but national prestige, it is perhaps not strange that when, as our ally, France was in turn a victor, she should be found trying to get back Louisiana for herself. To do this she had to play a double game, with the help of Spain, while that power stood ready in the background to take any thing that came in her way. These two gamesters wished to restore what we should call the old balance of power, thus confining the United States nearly in the limits they had occupied as colonies. To her honor, England would not listen to their seductive pleadings. Not that she loved her revolted subjects more, but that she loved her old rivals less. When John Jay gave their schemes to the light of day, it was seen France had never meant we should be a power among the nations—only a little republic. In the end England's pride prevailed over the sting of wounded self-love. Instead of dictating the terms of peace, as she had meant to do, France had to see herself shut out from Louisiana, for good and all, while Spain, the Mephistophiles of American affairs, recovered Florida from England, so excluding the United States from access to the Gulf of Mexico either by the seaboard or the Mississippi River. What was now left of French Louisiana, as it existed previous to this war, presented the anomaly of a colony of French people living under the Spanish flag. [Illustration: A MISSISSIPPI FLAT-BOAT.] In effect, John Jay had urged upon England that blood is thicker than water. Franklin said, "Let us now forgive and forget." And so the Anglo-Saxon spirit prevailed. With independence achieved, the United States gained, as we have seen, all the territory, except Canada, which England had conquered from France. At a single stride her frontier had reached the Mississippi on the west and the Great Lakes on the north.