England; and it was yet to be determined which of the two systems,
centralised autocracy enforcing uniformity, or self-government
encouraging variety of type, would prove the more successful and
would play the greater part. Two bodies of ideas so sharply
contrasted were bound to come into conflict. In the two great wars
between England and Louis XIV. (1688-1713), though the questions
at issue were primarily European, the conflict inevitably spread
to the colonial field; and in the result France was forced to cede
in 1713 the province of Acadia (which had twice before been in
English hands), the vast basin of Hudson's Bay, and the island of
Newfoundland, to which the fishermen of both nations had resorted,
though the English had always claimed it. But these were only
preliminaries, and the main conflict was fought out during the
half-century following the Peace of Utrecht, 1713-63.

During this half-century Britain was under the rule of the Whig
oligarchy, which had no clearly conceived ideas on imperial
policy. Under the influence of the mercantile class the Whigs
increased the severity of the restrictions on colonial trade, and
prohibited the rise of industries likely to compete with those of
the mother-country. But under the influence of laziness and
timidity, and of the desire quieta non movere, they made no
attempt seriously to enforce either the new or the old
restrictions, and in these circumstances smuggling trade between
the New England colonies and the French West Indies, in defiance
of the Navigation Act and its companions, grew to such dimensions
that any serious interference with it would be felt as a real
grievance. The Whigs and their friends later took credit for their
neglect. George Grenville, they said, lost the colonies because he
read the American dispatches; he would have done much better to