[boubinot] CANADA DURING THE VICTORIAN ERA B 



Acadie and the valley of the St. Lawrence, and the Spaniards conlined 

 themselves to the Antilles, Florida, Mexico, Peru and other rich lands of 

 the tropics. By the beginning of the eighteenth century France had 

 twenty thousand people on the banks of the St. Lawrence and its tribu- 

 tary rivers, and her adventurous explorers had passed from the basin of 

 the great lakes into the valley of the Mississippi and had given to France 

 a right to a vast region which extended to the Gulf of Mexico. The 

 English colonies were then hemmed in between the Atlantic coast and 

 the Ap23alachian ridges, beyond which none of their most daring j)io- 

 neers had passed when La Salle linked his name to all time with the 

 mighty river near which he met a melancholy death at the hands of 

 treacherous companions. France had now established a valid claim to 

 dominions whose possibilities of greatness were never understood by the 

 King and his Ministers, engrossed in the affairs of Europe. The end of 

 the war of the Spanish succession which brought such humiliation to 

 Louis Quatorze, and won so much fame for Marlborough, had very 

 significant results for France and England in IS'orth America. These 

 results have been most intelligently stated b}" an English. writer who has 

 reviewed the various phases of English colonial expansion from the voy- 

 ages of the Cabots until the reign of Queen Yictoria, who is Queen of an 

 Empire which would never have been born had not a spirit of maritime 

 enterprise and colonization been stimulated in the days of the Virgin 

 Queen. One hundred and ten years after the death of Elizabeth, when 

 another woman sat on the throne, France suffered a serious blow in 

 America, by the treaty of peace which Louis was forced to accept as a 

 result of the famous victories of Blenheim, Eamillies, Malplaquet and 

 Oudenarde. " At the time of the Armada," says Professor Seeley, "we 

 " saw England entering the race for the first time ; at Utrecht, England 

 " wins the race. . . . Her positive gains were Acadie or Nova Scotia 

 " and Xewfoundland, surrendered by France and the Assiento compact 

 " granted by France. In other words the first step was taken towards 

 " the destruction of greater France by depriving her of one of her three 

 " settlements of Acadie, Canada and Louisiana in North America. . . . 

 " The decisive event of it is the Seven Years' War, and the new position 

 " given to England by the treaty of Paris in 1763."^ 



The remarkable expansion of the colonial dependencies of England 

 during the Yictorian era may be then fairly considered as an evolution of 

 a series of events in the history of the empire. From the days of Ealegh 

 and other worthies of Elizabeth's day down to Pitt, Wolfe and Clive, 

 there is a steady succession of events which eventually placed England 

 in the van of colonial enterprise and maritime endeavour, but it was not 

 until three-quartei-s of a century had passed after the treaty of Paris — 



1 "Expansion of England," p. 132. 



