It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the
old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was
rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter. It is a
curious fact that England immediately adopted towards her own colonists
the policy of the very nationality she had ousted. From the date of the
triumphant peace won by Wolfe's victory, the British government became
the most active foe of the spread of the English race in America. This
position Britain maintained for many years after the failure of her
attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio valley. It was the position
she occupied when at Ghent in 1814 her commissioners tried to hem in the
natural progress of her colonists' children by the erection of a great
"neutral belt" of Indian territory, guaranteed by the British king. It
was the role which her statesmen endeavored to make her play when at a
later date they strove to keep Oregon a waste rather than see it peopled
by Americans.

In the northwest she succeeded to the French policy as well as the
French position. She wished the land to remain a wilderness, the home of
the trapper and the fur trader, of the Indian hunter and the French
voyageur. She desired it to be kept as a barrier against the growth of
the seaboard colonies towards the interior. She regarded the new lands
across the Atlantic as being won and settled, not for the benefit of the
men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and
traders who stayed at home. It was this that rendered the Revolution
inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude
of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act
or set of acts. The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been
many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of
grievances against them, on behalf of the mother country; but on the
great underlying question they were wholly in the right, and their