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CHAPTER XX.

ENGLAND, GRASPING AT THE COLONIES OF FRANCE AND SPAIN, RISKS THE LOSS OF HER OWN. BUTE'S MINIS

1762.

TRY.

1762-1763.

WHILE it was yet uncertain who, among British statesmen, would be selected to establish British authority in the colonies, the king, on the twenty-sixth of October, offering to return Havana to Spain for either the Floridas or Porto Rico, urged the instant consummation of the treaty. "The best despatch I can receive from you will be these preliminaries signed. May Providence, in compassion to human misery, give you the means of executing this great and noble work." Thus wrote the young monarch to Bedford, not dazzled by victory, and repressing the thirst for conquest; a rare instance of moderation, of which history must gratefully preserve the record. The terms proposed to the French were severe and even humiliating. "But what can we do?" said Choiseul, who in his despair had for a time resigned the foreign department to the Duke de Praslin. "The English are furiously imperious; they are drunk with success; and, unfortunately, we are not in a condition to abase their pride." France yielded to necessity; and, on the third day of November, the preliminaries of peace, a peace so momentous for America, were signed between France and Spain on the one side, and England and Portugal on the other.

To England were ceded, besides islands in the West Indies, the Floridas; Louisiana to the Mississippi, but without the island of New Orleans; all Canada; Acadia; Cape Breton and its dependent islands; and the fisheries, except that France retained a share in them, with the two islets St. Pierre and Miquelon, as a shelter for their fishermen.

For the loss of Florida, France on the same day indemnified Spain by ceding to that power New Orleans, and all Louisiana west of the Mississippi, with boundaries undefined.

In Africa, England acquired Senegal, with the command of the slave-trade.

In the East Indies, France, according to a modification proposed and insisted upon by Bedford, only recovered in a dismantled and ruined state the little that she possessed on the first of January, 1749; England obtained in that region the undoubted sway.

In Europe, where Frederic was left to take care of himself, each power received back its own; Minorca, therefore, reverted to Great Britain.

"The

"England," said the king, "never signed such a peace before, nor, I believe, any other power in Europe." country never," said the dying Granville, " saw so glorious a war or so honorable a peace." It maintains, thought Thomas Hollis, who was no flatterer of kings, the maritime power, the interests, the security, the tranquillity, and the honor of England. The judgment of mankind, out of England, then and ever since, has pronounced on it similar decisions. For once, to the surprise of everybody, Bute spoke well, rising in its defence in the house of lords. "I wish," said he, no better inscription on my tomb than that I was its author."

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On the morning of the ninth of December, the very 1762. day on which the preliminaries were to be discussed in parliament, Charles Townshend resigned his place as secretary at war. The opposition, on his resigning, had great hopes of his joining them. But, always preserving intimate relations with George III., he still aspired to the management of the plantations as third secretary of state; and when Pitt spoke against the peace for three hours and twenty minutes, for the first hour admirably, then with flagging strength, "though even in his scrawls showing the masterly hand of a Raphael,” and an “indisputable superior- . ity to all others," Charles Townshend, in a speech of but twenty-five minutes, made an answer "with great judgment, wit, and strength of argument."

On the division, the opponents of the treaty were but sixty-five against three hundred and nineteen. "Now," said the princess dowager, on hearing the great majority, "my son is indeed king of England." Yet Townshend, who had so much contributed to swell the vote, in the progress of his own ambition, had for a rival Halifax, his old superior at the board of trade, who was equally desirous of the department of the colonies, with the rank of a secretary of state.

1763.

In the first days of January, 1763, it was publicly avowed what had long been resolved on, that a standing army of twenty battalions was to be kept up in America after the peace; and, as the ministry were all the while promising great things in point of economy, it was designed that the expense should be defrayed by the colonists themselves.

On the tenth day of February, 1763, the treaty was ratified; and five days afterwards, at the hunting-castle of Hubertsburg, a definitive treaty closed the war of the empress queen and the elector of Saxony against the great Frederic. The year of 1761 had ended for Frederic in gloom. Hardly sixty thousand men remained to him to resist the whole circle of his enemies. He has himself described the extremity of his distress, and has proudly bid the world learn from his example that, in great affairs, perseverance lifts statesmen above perils. Deserted most unexpectedly by George III., he found Russia suddenly transformed from an enemy to an ally, desirable from its strength, yet dangerous from the indiscretions of its sovereign. But when the seizure of domains of the Russian clergy by Peter III., and the introduction of an unwonted military system, had provoked the clergy and the army to effect a revolution by his dethronement and murder, his wife Catharine-a German princess, who had adopted the religion and carefully studied the language, the customs, and institutions of Russia; a woman of such endowments that she was held to be the ablest person in its court- was advanced, over the ruin of her husband, to the throne of the czars. More wise than her predecessor, she abandoned

1763.

projects of war and revenge; and in the midsummer of 1762, recalling the Russian army, she gave to the world the instructive lesson of moderation and neutrality. The territories of Prussia, which France had evacuated, Bute left, as he said, "to be scrambled for;" but there was no one to wrest them from Frederic; and, after seven years of unequalled effort against the aristocracies and despotisms of continental Europe, the hero of Prussia won a triumph for freedom by the glorious treaty of Hubertsburg, which gave security of existence to his state without the cession of a hand's-breadth of his dominions. Thus was arrested the course of carnage and misery; of sorrows in private life infinite and unfathomable; of wretchedness heaped on wretchedness; of public poverty and calamity; of forced enlistments and extorted contributions; and all the unbridled tyranny of military power in the day of danger. France was exhausted of one half of her specie; in many parts of Germany, there remained not enough of men or of cattle to renew cultivation. The number of the dead in arms is computed at eight hundred and eighty-six thousand on the battle-fields of Europe, or on the way to them. And all this devastation and waste of life and of resources produced for those who planned it no gain whatever, nothing but weakness and losses. Not an inch of land was torn from the dominions of Frederic; not a limit to the boundaries of any state was contracted or advanced. Europe, in its territorial divisions, remained exactly as before. But in Asia and America how was the world changed!

In Asia, the victories of Clive at Plassey, of Coote at the Wandiwash, and of Watson and Pococke on the Indian seas, had given England the undoubted ascendency in the East Indies, opening to her suddenly the promise of untold treasures and territorial acquisitions without end.

In America, the Teutonic race, with its strong tendency to individuality and freedom, was become the master from the Gulf of Mexico to the poles; and the English tongue, which, but a century and a half before, had for its entire world a part only of two narrow islands on the outer verge

of Europe, was now to spread more widely than any that had ever given expression to human thought.

Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country, take possession of the North American continent! Gladden the waste places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for man! Give an echo to the now silent and solitary mountains; gush out with the fountains, that as yet sing their anthems all day long without response; fill the valleys with the voices of love in its purity, the pledges of friendship in its faithfulness; and as the morning sun drinks the dewdrops from the flowers all the way from the dreary Atlantic to the Peaceful Ocean, meet him with the joyous hum of the early industry of freemen! Utter boldly and spread widely through the world the thoughts of the coming apostles of the people's liberty, till the sound that cheers the desert shall thrill through the heart of humanity, and the lips of the messenger of the people's power, as he stands in beauty upon the mountains, shall proclaim the renovating tidings of equal freedom for the race!

England enjoyed the glory of extended dominion, in the confident expectation of a boundless increase of wealth. But its success was due to its having taken the lead in the good old struggle for liberty; and was destined to bring fruits not so much to itself as to the cause of freedom and mankind.

France, of all the states on the continent of Europe, the most powerful by territorial unity, wealth, numbers, industry, and culture, seemed also, by its place, marked out for maritime ascendency. Set between many seas, it rested upon the Mediterranean, possessed harbors on the German Ocean, and embraced within its wide shores and jutting headlands the bays and open waters of the Atlantic; its people, infolding at one extreme the offspring of colonists from Greece, and at the other the hardy children of the Northmen, were called, as it were, to the inheritance of life upon the sea. The nation, too, readily conceived or appropriated great ideas, and delighted in bold resolves. Its

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