court a document which sets forth in uncompromising terms the
rights of France to all the land between the thirtieth and the
fiftieth parallels of latitude. True, he says, others occupy much
of this territory, but France must drive out intruders and in
particular the English. Boston rightly belongs to France and so
also do New York and Philadelphia. The only regions to which
England has any just claim are Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson
Bay, ceded by France under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This
weak cession all true Frenchmen regret and England must hand the
territories back. She owes France compensation for her long
occupation of lands not really hers. If she makes immediate
restitution, the King of France, generous and kind, will forego
some of his rights and allow England to retain a strip some fifty
miles wide extending from Maine to Florida. France has the right
to the whole of the interior. In the mind of the reverend
memorialist, no doubt, there was the conviction that England
would soon lose the meager strip, fifty miles wide, which France
might yield.

These dreams of power had a certain substance. It seems to us now
that, from the first, the French were dreaming of the impossible.
We know what has happened, and after the event it is an easy task
to measure political forces. The ambitions of France were not,
however, empty fancies. More than once she has seemed on the
point of mastering the nations of the West. Just before the year
1690 she had a great opportunity. In England, in 1660, the fall
of the system created by Oliver Cromwell brought back to the
English throne the House of Stuart, for centuries the ally and
usually the pupil of France. Stuart kings of Scotland, allied
with France, had fought the Tudor kings of England. Stuarts in