Over the hills the French were lords of the land. The
frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and
tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone he
could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills; so he
halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be overlord
of two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which would
open the westward road.
The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of
Autocracy against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the men
of the eighteenth century as the second half of that century
dawned. In our own day, happily, that issue has been perceived by
the rank and file of the people. In those darker days, as France
and England grappled in that conflict of systems which culminated
in the Seven Years' War, the fundamental principles at stake were
clear to only a handful of thinking men.
But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause
ambassadors to demand their passports. The declaration of war
awaits the overt act. Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled
by a little fire! The casus belli between France and England in
the Seven Years' War--the war which humbled France in Europe and
lost her India and Canada--had to do with a small log fort built
by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of the Ohio River and
wrested from them in the same year by a company of Frenchmen from
Canada.
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