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 Quebec, the end was not far off. Three British armies, coming by different roads, gradually closed round the Canadian capital of Montreal, and in 1760 all was over, and North America was British from the Polar ice to Cape Florida; the one little French settlement on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, had lost all importance.

In India there is a similar story of conquest to be told. There, the native princes had, on the whole, inclined to the French side. One of them—Surajah from Dowlah—took Calcutta in 1756, and allowed a number of English prisoners to be suffocated in a horrible dungeon called the ‘Black Hole’. Clive, with about two thousand Sepoys and Englishmen, came up from Madras to avenge this. He retook Calcutta, and won a victory, against odds of twenty-five to one, at Plassey in 1757. That victory extended the power of the East India Company far into Bengal. In the region of Madras our success was equally great; and in 1761 we took Pondicherry, and swept the French out of all India. All the native princes at once went over to our side.

What was it that gave us, a nation of less than eight millions of men, these amazing successes over a nation of at least twenty millions, more naturally warlike, quite as brave, and much cleverer than ourselves? It was mainly one thing, sea power. The nation that commands the sea by having the greatest number of ships and the best-trained sailors, will always beat its rivals in distant lands, simply because it commands the roads leading to those lands. If you look back to the beginnings of things you will see that it was Cromwell, it was Elizabeth, nay, it was Henry VIII and Henry VII, who, by their early and wise care for our