were the elements of friction; but Pepperell was a man of tact and good temper, the land fighting devolved wholly on the Colonists, the men from home had charge of the sea, and land and sea forces worked in general harmony with each other. For forty-seven days Warren's ships, reinforced from home, blockaded the harbour, while on land Pepperell's men pressed the siege, conspicuous for courage and determination as for want of military training and expert skill. At the end of that time, in the middle of June, the garrison capitulated, and the fortress passed for the moment into the keeping of the New Englanders. The relative importance of events does not change with the centuries; but, as the world grows older, the drama of men and nations is on a constantly greater scale. There cannot have been ten thousand men in all engaged on both sides at Louisbourg in the year 1745; yet the taking of the stronghold, at the time, under the conditions, with the limited resources of the place and of the day, still stands as perhaps the most brilliant single feat of arms ever achieved by British Colonists. For it was in the main the Colonists' work; theirs was the initiative, they bore the brunt of the fight. Without the command of the water, which the King's ships ensured, Louisbourg could not have been taken, but none the less the New Englanders were the protagonists. This was the view of a French resident in Louisbourg at the time, an eye-witness of the siege. The enterprise', he wrote, was less that of the nation or of the King, than of the inhabitants of New England alone.' It was the view of the English King, George the Second, who, according to the common story, when the retrocession of Louisbourg was being considered, stated that it was not his to give away, that it belonged to the men of Boston. The path of the British Empire has been strewn with lost opportunities-not wholly lost, if taken for admonition and guidance in these later and more spacious times. 1 'Louisbourg in 1745: the anonymous Lettre d'un habitant de Louisbourg, edited and translated by Professor George Wrong, 1897, p. 37. The retrocession of Louis bourg by the peace of 1748. There never was a fairer opening for cementing unity between the Mother Country and the Colonies than the occasion of this great Colonial success. The New Englanders looked at it through their Puritan eyes: they saw in it the hand of the Lord their God, who had brought down the mighty through the agency of His chosen people, fighting, in some sort, like David, not with the up-to-date panoply of warfare but with the sling and the stone. Proud of what their own men had done, they were ready enough to acknowledge the help which the Mother Country had given, and which for the moment obliterated memories of repeated neglect and interminable delays. But it was all thrown away. The King's advisers, less discerning than the King himself, by the Treaty of Aix La Chapelle in 1748, gave back to France Cape Breton Island and Louisbourg, regaining in turn from France on the other side of the world Madras, which had been taken by the French. Here was an early illustration of the political difficulties which attend a far-flung line. After each war there comes a balancing of accounts, an inevitable process of give and take, when it is impossible to prevent disappointment and chagrin in one quarter or another. But let us suppose that Tsingtau had belonged in full right to Germany, that the Australians, of their own initiative and with the help of a squadron of the Royal Navy, had played the part which the Japanese played and taken from the Germans this Louisbourg of the China seas. Suppose, as the sequel, that the British Government had, at the end of the War, without consulting the Commonwealth in any way, given back Tsingtau to Germany in return for some gain with which the Commonwealth had no concern, it can be imagined how lasting and deepseated would have been the resentment in Australia. Those who look for the real causes why the North American Colonists parted company with Great Britain will find them farther back than the years when taxation without representation gave immediate ground for discontent, and principal among them was the failure of the Home Government to take occasion by the hand, to appreciate the points at which and the hours in which local patriotism coincided with loyalty to the Empire. between the Pro and the The French onlooker at Louisbourg noted with interest Diversity and wonderment the wide differences which existed between the Colonial troops and the men from home. vincials 'In fact,' he wrote, 'one could never have told that Regulare. these troops belonged to the same nation and obeyed the same prince. Only the English are capable of such oddities, which nevertheless form a part of that precious liberty of which they show themselves so jealous.' 1 Poles asunder they seemed to be, and in truth they were. The forces which had inspired the colonization of New England were centrifugal forces; the first Colonists had gone to the wilderness to be free from political and religious control: the ocean, not traversed by steam, not underset by submarine cable, perpetuated and intensified separation a race grew up modelled on new lines in the New World. Diversities exist still within our Empire, and, it is to be hoped, will always exist. We do not merely tolerate, we welcome diverse characteristics in mind and body, whereby one member of the Empire, or one group of members, supplements the others, to the strengthening and enriching of the whole. We recognize proudly and gladly that the Home Briton brings one contribution to the common stock, while the Canadian or Australian Briton brings from the prairies or the backblocks other contributions of different kind but equal value; that the non-British races within the Empire supply some ingredients which Nature has refused to our own. But the blending was wanting in the eighteenth century the diversity was there, but it was a source of weakness not of strength, for want of intelligent handling, and for want of the growing familiarity with and appreciation of one another, which better communication has brought in its train. In 1756, eleven years after the taking of Louisbourg, The Seven France and England were again at open war, and for the Years 1 Ut sup., p. 58. War. The defeat of General last time men of the Old North American Colonies fought under the British flag, side by side with British troops of the Line. It was the Seven Years War, before 1914, perhaps, of all the wars to which the Empire has been a party, most conspicuously an Empire War, marked, as it was, by the successes of Amherst and Wolfe in America, of Clive and Coote in India. Long before war had been formally proclaimed between the two nations, French and English, in 1754 and 1755, were killing one another in North America; and on the 9th of July 1755 occurred the memorable fight on the Monongahela river, when General Braddock's small army, marching to reduce Fort Duquesne, was annihilated by Braddock. French and Indians. The force included a contingent of Virginians, who, in the tale of the disaster, were contrasted favourably with the Regulars. Washington, who was present throughout the battle, wrote in bitter terms of what he styled the dastardly behaviour of the English soldiers as compared with the Virginians; but he was himself a Virginian, and it should be remembered that in the two battalions of the Line engaged the recruits numbered fully one-half, and between a quarter and a third were Colonists. The Royal Americans. 1 This was one outcome of the reverse- -to lower the reputation of the Regulars in the eyes of the Colonists, to exalt that of the Provincials. But another and a more salutary result followed. The Home Government wisely decided to enlist among the troops of the Line a body of men familiar with the conditions of North American warfare. Accordingly, in 1756, four battalions were raised of Royal Americans, each battalion comprising ten companies, and each company 100 privates, the total number of non-commissioned officers and men amounting to 4,400. These were the ancestors of the famous 60th Regiment the King's Royal Rifle Corps. The rank and file included English, Swiss, and Germans settled in 1 See Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, 1884 ed., vol. i, p. 230. The two Regular battalions were the 44th and the 48th, now the Essex and Northampton regiments. * See Butler's Annals of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, vol. i, 1913, pp. 2–4. |