The things we do!

" But if
it was an episode to the New Englander, or even to Frenchmen at the
distance in time at which I write, it rises to the importance of history
out in that region of America, where a century of unexampled fortitude
needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it its place in the
world's consciousness.
Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as well as statesmen of
that time, are in substantial agreement in this: That the presence of the
French on all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of the
varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them penned in
between the mountains and the sea until there had been developed some
degree of solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by the
sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure not only allowed their
expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of
dependence upon her.
"We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's minister, Choiseul,
speaking of the treaty of Paris in 1763.


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