remedy. Within a few months, under his direction, English troops were
in every part of the world, and English ships of war were sailing
every ocean, to recover the slipping elements and to solidify the
British Empire. Just as Pitt was taking up his residence at Downing
Street, Robert Clive was winning the Battle of Plassey in India, which
brought to England territory of untold wealth. Two years later James
Wolfe, defeating the French commander, Montcalm, on the Plains of
Abraham, added not only Quebec, but all Canada, to the British Crown,
and ended French rivalry north of the Great Lakes. Victories like
these, seemingly so casual, really as final and as unrevisable as
Fate, might well cause Englishmen to suspect that Destiny itself
worked with them, and that an Englishman could be trusted to endure
through any difficulties to a triumphant conclusion.

Beaten at every point where they met the British, the French, even
after they had secured an alliance with Spain, which proved of little
worth, were glad to make peace. On February 10, 1763, they signed
the Treaty of Paris, which confirmed to the British nearly all their
victories and left England the dominant Power in both hemispheres.
The result of the war produced a marked effect on the people of the
British Colonies in North America. "At no period of time," says Chief
Justice Marshall, in his "Life of Washington," "was the attachment of
the colonists to the mother country more strong, or more general, than
in 1763, when the definitive articles of the treaty which restored
peace to Great Britain, France, and Spain, were signed."[1] But we
who know the sequel perceive that the Seven Years' War not only
strengthened the attachment between the Colonies and the Mother
Country, but that it also made the Colonies aware of their common
interests, and awakened among them mutual friendship, and in a very
brief time their sense of unity prevailed over their temporary