confronted each other in America. The conflict for the New World
was but the continuation of an age-long antagonism in the Old,
intensified now by the savagery of the wilderness and by new
dreams of empire. There was another potent cause of strife which
had not existed in the earlier days. When, during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, the antagonists had fought through the
interminable Hundred Years' War, they had been of the same
religious faith. Since then, however, England had become
Protestant, while France had remained Catholic. When the rivals
first met on the shores of the New World, colonial America was
still very young. It was in 1607 that the English occupied
Virginia. At the same time the French were securing a foothold
in Acadia, now Nova Scotia. Six years had barely passed when
the English Captain Argall sailed to the north from Virginia
and destroyed the rising French settlements. Sixteen years
after this another English force attacked and captured Quebec.
Presently these conquests were restored. France remained in
possession of the St. Lawrence and in virtual possession of
Acadia. The English colonies, holding a great stretch of the
Atlantic seaboard, increased in number and power. New France
also grew stronger. The steady hostility of the rivals never
wavered. There was, indeed, little open warfare as long as the
two Crowns remained at peace. From 1660 to 1688, the Stuart
rulers of England remained subservient to their cousin the
Bourbon King of France and at one with him in religious faith.
But after the fall of the Stuarts France bitterly denounced the
new King, William of Orange, as both a heretic and a usurper, and
attacked the English in America with a savage fury unknown in
Europe. From 1690 to 1760 the combatants fought with little more
than pauses for renewed preparation; and the conflict ended only