And now comes the strangest part of the story. We get quite accustomed to thinking of the American colonies as the football of European diplomacy, our reading of history has fully prepared us for that: but we are not prepared to find events in the New World actually shaping the course of those in the Old. In a word, England lost the battle in Europe, but won it in America. France was confounded at seeing the key to Canada in the hands of the enemy she had just beaten. England and France were like two duellists who have had a scuffle, in the course of which they have exchanged weapons. Instead of dictating terms, France had to compromise matters. For the sake of preserving her colonial possessions, she now had to give up her dear-bought conquests on the continent of Europe. Hostilities were suspended. All the belligerents agreed to restore what they had taken from each other, and cry quits; but it is plain that France would never have consented to such a settlement at a time when her adversaries were so badly crippled, when all England was in a ferment, and she hurrying back her troops from Holland in order to put down rebellion at home, thus leaving the coalition of which she was the head to stand or fall without her. France would not have stayed her victorious march, we think, under such circumstances as these, unless the nation’s attention had been forcibly recalled to the gravity of the situation in America. In some respects this episode of history recalls the story of the mailed giant, armed to the teeth, and of the stripling with his sling. As all the conquests of this war were restored by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Cape Breton went to France again. Thus had New England made herself felt across the Atlantic by an exhibition of power, as unlooked-for as it was suggestive to thoughtful men. To some it was merely like that put forth by the infant Hercules, in his cradle. But to England, the unnatural mother, it was a notice that the child she had neglected was coming to manhood, ere long to claim a voice in the disposal of its own affairs.