[SHORTT] PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS .67 
natural and convenient meeting point for the traffic in exports from 
France to the American colonies—Canada and the West Indies. It 
was also convenient for the purchase and exchange of sugar, molasses, 
rum, and other West Indian produce and the peltry, grain, cattle, fish, 
timber, and coal, from Canada and Cape Breton. At the same time, 
it furnished an excellent harbour and naval base, not only for the 
commercial shipping which centred there, but for the warships of 
France in their eternal conflict with the British Navy and their 
equally constant raids upon British commerce. Provisioned and 
equipped at Louisburg, the French war vessels sallied forth to prey 
upon the numerous fishing and trading vessels of the British American 
colonies passing too and fro between Boston and other New England 
ports and the fishing banks off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, or 
upon the larger vessels carrying rich cargoes of miscellaneous merch- 
andise between the ports of Britain and those of her American colonies 
from Nova Scotia to the West Indies. When, however, the French 
men-of-war sighted a superior British force, they found a safe refuge 
in Louisburg Harbour under the protection of its formidable forti- 
fications. To Louisburg, also, were brought the numerous prizes which 
were captured in that neighborhood. 
Under normal conditions, the Canadian merchants could export, 
at heavy charges only a limited number of native products, chiefly 
furs, to the ports of France and obtain thence under equally heavy 
charges a meagre supply of manufactured goods. But, under the 
conditions of warfare just indicated, they found at Louisburg, within 
reach of their own small vessels and fishing craft, an ample market for 
every possible line of provisions and naval stores, while there too they 
obtained, at exceptionally low rates, a great variety of manufactured 
goods, largely taken from British prizes brought into that port. 
Little wonder then that for the five years of active maritime warfare 
between 1740 and the first capture of Louisburg by the British colonial 
forces from Boston, Canada enjoyed a period of exceptional prosperity 
and the novel experience of exchanges regularly in her favour. The 
changed conditions for Canada resulting from the loss of Louisburg 
may be illustrated from the single fact that before its capture Canadian 
flour was selling at ten to twelve livres per quintal (108 Ibs.), while 
after the capture, the price fell to six to seven livres. 
With the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1745, Cape Breton and 
Louisburg were once more restored to France, to the intense chagrin 
of the American colonies and the corresponding joy of the Canadian 
and other French possessions in America. Although for a time there 
was nominally peace between France and England in Europe, there was 
bitter rivalry and but thinly veiled war between their possessions in 
