Montreal, and thence up Lake Champlain to Crown Point and Ticonderoga,
and on westward and south-westward to Frontenac, Niagara and Detroit,
and thence down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, he will trace
the line across which the two nations looked in defiance at each other,
and see instantaneously that the claims of France were inadmissable, and
that another war was inevitable. It mattered little that of the
forty-five years immediately preceding the treaty of Aix La Chapelle,
fourteen, or one-third of the whole number, had been years of war
between these two neighbors. They were now, after a peace of only half a
dozen years, as ready for a fresh contest as if they were to meet for
the first time upon the battle field. In fact, another conflict was
unavoidable; a conflict of the Teuton with the Gaul; of medievalism with
daylight; of conservatism with progress; of the old Church with the new;
of feudalism with democracy--a conflict which should settle the destiny
of North America, making it English and Protestant, or French and Roman
Catholic; a contest, too, in which the victor was to gain more than he
knew, and the vanquished was to loose more than he ever dreamed of.

Hostilities may be said to have been commenced by the French, when, on
the 18th day of April, 1754, they dispossessed the Ohio company of the
fort which they were erecting at the forks of the Ohio River, afterwards
named Fort Du Quesne.

The plan of a Colonial Confederation, formed at the Albany convention in
July of that year, having failed of acceptance by the mother country and
the Colonies both, the Home government was forced to meet the exigency
by the use of British troops, aided by such others as the several
Provinces were willing to furnish.

The campaign of the next year (1755) embraced: