as against Great Britain; and British ships and ship captains were charged with violating international rights. But the war itself was pre-eminently a Canadian war. Canada was the main scene of the fighting: the possession of Canada, as a suitable corollary to the successful War of Independence, was the prize for which the Americans fought. It was an interlude in the main struggle against military domination, a side-show', as the saying goes, as were the Ashanti and Boxer troubles at the time of the South African War, but none the less it was a war of primary importance in the story of the development of the British Empire; for the effect of the war was to vindicate the United Empire Loyalists of Upper Canada, to bring the British and French nationalities in Canada closer together, and to speed Canada a long way on her path as a nation. As when the Americans overran the land in 1775, so, when the later war broke out, there were but few Regular British troops in Canada, only four regiments of the Line. It was a time when British resources were strained to the utmost in the Peninsular War. On the other hand, there was now no question of French-Canadians making common cause either with revolting Colonists or with a Mother Country in which the old régime had passed away for ever; and under tolerant British rule, differences of creed in Canada were no longer a bar to united action in the face of common danger. Militia, British and French, fought by the side of the Regulars. At the successful skirmish of Chateauguay, French-Canadians under a French-Canadian leader had the field to themselves. Prominent among the saviours of Canada were the Glengarry regiment, Roman Catholic Macdonells and Highlanders, many of them old soldiers, who had settled in Canada.1 There was There was a New Brunswick regiment

1 The Glengarrys were properly called Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles'. They appear in the Army List for 1812 and lasted till 1816. 6 Fencibles,' i. e. 'Defensibles', were in origin a species of Militia formed by voluntary enlistment for the defence of a particular district and for a limited time. The New Brunswick unit was raised as a corps of Fencibles about 1803, but was brought into the Line as the 104th in 1810. It was disbanded in 1817.

and there was a Newfoundland regiment,1 sent over to aid the sister dominion. The forces which were collected or created to defend Canada, by their diversity, bore witness that the spirit of co-operation was active and strong. Nor should it be forgotten that the British commander in Upper Canada in the earliest and most critical stage of the war, Isaac Brock, of Guernsey birth, who fell deplored at Queenston Heights, as Lord Howe at Ticonderoga, had in him much of the personal magnetism, the cementing force, which endeared Lord Howe to North American Colonists. The end of it was that Canada neither lost nor gained in territory, but that her status and her people gained immeasurably. The Treaty of Ghent, which closed this American War, was signed in December 1814; and after the Hundred Days' campaign in the following year, ending at Waterloo, the world was once more at peace.

1 A regiment was raised in Newfoundland in or about 1794 and styled the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles'. It was disbanded in or about 1800 and succeeded by the 'Newfoundland Light Infantry'. This regiment again was short-lived, and was succeeded by the Royal Newfoundland Rangers', who were reorganized in 1812.

CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE INDIAN ARMY

THERE can hardly have been a time when, in the factories of the East India Company, bearing of arms in case of need was wholly confined to Europeans; but the beginnings of the Indian Army, as we know it to-day, date from the middle of the eighteenth century. Early in overseas history the Portuguese in India, as the Spaniards in America, trained and used native soldiers; but at a later date the French were pre-eminent in India in employing native troops, armed, organized, and disciplined after the manner of European regiments. The French governors of Pondicherry adopted the system, and notably Dumas, in or about the year 1739, raised and trained three or four thousand Mohammedan soldiers. His successor, the great Dupleix, increased their numbers; and with this new military machinery, supplemented by political alliances with native potentates, the French made a strong bid for supremacy in Southern India. Writing of the year 1746, the historian Orme tells us, 'At this time the English had not adopted the idea of training the Indian natives in the European discipline, notwithstanding the French had set the example, by raising four or five companies of Sepoys at Pondicherry '. Very soon, however, the English followed the lead given to them by the French, and bettered it.

Isolated from one another, on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts and in the Bay of Bengal, the East India Company's factories or groups of factories developed their respective defence forces on more or less separate lines; and even after the Indian Mutiny, when the Company had ceased to exist, and the control of its troops,

1 Orme's History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from the year 1745 (third ed., 1780, vol. i, p. 81). As stated in the text, the Portuguese, not the French, were the original pioneers in the use of disciplined native troops.