THE FIRST ANGLO-FRENCH DUEL 107 



to create a sphere, in which the fishing easements of nomadic 

 French fishermen overlapped and must one day conflict with 

 the rights of possible English settlers. But these tares did 

 not injure the wheat-field until many years later. So far as 

 Newfoundland was concerned the southern parts of the island, 

 including Placentia, St. Pierre, and Miquelon, were wholly 

 transferred to England, and it was impossible that the events of 

 1696-7, 1705, and 1709 could be repeated. Newfoundland 

 lay only in a sequestered nook of the theatre of war; and 

 elsewhere there was compensation, and compromise. Amongst 

 other articles in the Treaty, Cape Breton Island was ceded in 

 clear terms to France, and Nova Scotia in ambiguous terms 

 to England; and during the next thirty years of profound 

 peace echoes of the past storm, and avant-couriers of the 

 coming storm, were heard from time to time along the coasts 

 of North America, and troubled those who noted that new 

 seeds of conflict between French and English had been sown 

 by the short-sighted or sinister authors of the Treaty of 

 Utrecht. But were they short-sighted or sinister ? Or were 

 they merely the mouthpieces through which an inevitable and 

 universal weariness of war voiced itself? We have already 

 arrived at the period when there were two parties in the State, 

 when constitutional government began in England, and when 

 constituents became a power ; and when, though the division 

 between East and West was healed and forgotten, and the 

 new parties tended towards domestic peace, a new civil war 

 between a Jacobite and a Hanoverian successor to Queen 

 Anne seemed very imminent. It was untrue that these 

 statesmen 'preferred far Th' unjustest peace before the justest 

 war ' ; but it was true that after nearly a quarter of a century 

 of war they preferred the possible to the perfect. 



