298 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

match for the neighbouring British colonial population, if left to its own
resources, was deprived of indispensable support from the mother coun-
try in Europe in the hour of need by the ascendancy that the British Navy
had gained over the French. Through the combined and cumulative
effect of these two shifts in the Balance of Power, the French Crown not
only failed to achieve its ambition of bringing the whole of North America
under its own rule, but actually lost all its holdings on North American
soil in the Seven Years War. Yet the peace settlement of A.D. 1763, which
ratified this outcome of a Franco-British war over North America that
had been smouldering, off and on, for some seventy years in effect,
appeared to have disappointed French ambitions without invalidating
the geographico-political conception on which these had been based. In
declaring against France's design to unite the whole of North America
under the French flag, the course of Modern Western history up to date
had apparently substantiated the French 'geopolitical' thesis that a uni-
fication under one flag or another was the political dispensation to which
North America was predestined by her physiographical structure. The
fortunes of war might now have decided that the unifying West European
Power was to be, not France, but Great Britain; yet in A.D. 1763 this
might have looked as if it were only a superficial modification of a
course of political events which seemed still to be moving steadily
towards a now more than ever apparently inevitable ultimate goal of
unity.

Nevertheless, within not more than twenty years of the disappearance
of the French nag from North America in A.D. 1763, the peace-settle-
ment of A.D. 1783 was to indicate that the dominant tendency in this
North American episode of Western history was, not the nisus towards
political unification that was inherent in the giant island's physiography
and that, in A.D. 1763, had been momentarily translated into an accom-
plished political fact, but an inclination to fall apart, in defiance of phy-
siography, into two separate political domains on lines foreshadowed in
the competitive plantation of English and French colonies on North
American coasts in the seventeenth century of the Christian Era. The
political map of North America after A.D. 1783 was, and remained, in its
general pattern, the same map of a politically partitioned island that it
had been before A.D. 1763, with the two originally separate political
domains once again separate under interchanged flags,1 whereas the
map of a politically united North American island, which had been a
political reality between A.D. 1763 and A.D. 1775, turned out to have been
merely History's passing tribute to a Physiography whose political
requirements History was evidently bent on defying. After having per-

1 While the French flag had disappeared from North America and the United States
flag had made its epiphany there, the British flag had kept a footing on the North
American island by contriving to supplant the French flag in Canada before it was
supplanted, in its turn, by the Stars and Stripes in the United States. An English
traveller en route by rail from New York to Montreal in A.D. 1952 would have the his-
torically pregnant experience, at the moment when his train crossed the border, of re-
entering the dominions of the sovereign whose subject he was and at the same instant
passing out of the domain of his own English mother tongue into eastern counties of the
Province of Quebec in which the place-names might be English but the prevailing lan-
guage was unquestionably French!.