'THERE IS NO ARMOUR AGAINST FATE* 297

native bent against a fifteenth-century Italian renaissance of Hellenic art
and letters is delineated with what would be a fine sense of historical
reality if only the philosopher-hierophant had been content to present his
findings as the matters of fact which they are—without importing the
ex cathedra judgement that they are also the fore-ordained acts of an
ineluctable Destiny.

After thus taking warning from the spectacle of Spengler's self-stulti-
fication against the error of reading the unproven operation of an hypo-
thetical Destiny into secular tendencies in human affairs which have
happened in the end to win decisive victories over a stubborn opposition,
we may now proceed, without prejudice to a still open issue between
Law and Freedom in History, to take note of certain other episodes in
which some tendency has reasserted itself in the face of successive rebel-
lions against it. Such resolutions of conflicting human forces, in which
Spengler would see the hand of 'Fate', can be observed in the histories
of the political fortunes of territories; in the histories of encounters
between different civilizations; and in the histories of struggles between
conflicting religious concepts, doctrines, and allegiances; and this rhythm
is endemic in the history of Man, in which all those particular episodes
are embraced.

There is a conspicuous rendering of this rhythm in the political
history of North America since its incorporation into a Western World
expanding overseas from a Western European nucleus.

The unitary physiography of North America, with its magnificent
natural system of internal waterways providing means of through-com-
munication from the delta of the Mississippi to the estuary of the St.
Lawrence via the Great Lakes, manifestly gave this giant Northern
Island of the Western Hemisphere a physical predisposition to become
the unitary political dominion of some single one out of the litter of
Modern West European national states that were in competition for the
prizes of a Western Society's New World. The French pioneers of West
European enterprise in North America were quick to perceive this
geographical nisus towards political unity, and they went on to take
deliberate and systematic steps to bring the whole of North America
under the all-embracing rule of the French Crown by entrenching
themselves at both extremities of the central waterway and establish-
ing a chain of connecting links inland between these two maritime
terminals.1

In the course of the hundred years ending in AJD. 1763 this grandly
conceived and ambitiously initiated French enterprise was frustrated by
two unforeseen developments to the disadvantage of France in her con-
test for the possession of North America with her rival Great Britain. In
the first place the British colonies planted along the eastern seaboard
outstripped French Canada and Louisiana in the growth of their popu-
lation to an extent that more than made up for the handicap of a location
—hemmed in between the Atlantic and the Appalachians—that was, in
itself, much less favourable for expansion into the interior.2 In the second
place a French colonial population in North America that was now no

i See II. ii. 66-67. 2 See ibid.

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