Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/590

576 and decamped as rapidly as he had come, leaving behind him his baggage and artillery. Nor was the marquis de Vaudreuil left long undisturbed at Montreal. The three expeditions, which had failed to meet the preceding summer, were now ordered to converge on Montreal—Amherst from Lake Ontario, Amherst from Crown Point, and Murray from Quebec. Amherst had been detained at Oswego by an outbreak of the Cherokees against us. This native tribe had been friendly to us, and we had built a fort in their country, and called it Fort Loudon, after lord Loudon; but in the autumn of 1759 they had been bought over by the French, and made a terrible raid on our back settlements, murdering and scalping the defenceless inhabitants. Mr. Lyttleton, the governor of South Carolina, marched against them with a thousand men, and compelled them to submission; but no sooner had he retired than they recommenced their hostilities, and Amherst sent against them colonel Montgomery, with one thousand two hundred men, who made a merciless retaliation, plundering and burning their villages, so as to imprint a sufficient terror upon them.



Amherst had now ten thousand men; and though he had to carry all his baggage and artillery over the Ontario in open boats, and to pass the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, he made a most able and prosperous march, reducing the fort of Ile Royale on the way, and reached the isle of Montreal on the very same day as Murray, and a day before Haviland. Vaudreuil saw that resistance was hopeless, and capitulated on the 8th of September. The French were, according to contract, sent home, under engagement not to come against us during the remainder of the war. Besides this, lord Byron chased a squadron of three frigates, convoying twenty store-ships to Quebec, into the Bay of Chaleurs, and there destroyed them. Thus all the French possessions in North America, excepting the recent and feeble settlement of New Orleans, remained in our hands.

The war in Germany grew more and more bloody. Frederick of Prussia, in his winter quarters at Freyberg, seems to have ruminated gloomily on his situation. In his desperate conflict of five millions of people against ninety millions, he had certainly shown that he was a great military genius, but that was his only greatness. The whole of this bloody struggle had been produced by his unprincipled invasion of his neighbours territories in order to enlarge his own; and, however human policy may endeavour to reconcile such conduct to the rules of Christian truth and morality by the mere phrases of "great talent," "martial glory," "expansive policy," and the like, these phrases do not any the more render robbery and murder for your own self-interest the less criminal and disgraceful; if they did, they would loosen all the bonds of society, and the man in private life who murdered his neighbour and seized his estate, would be worthy of our applause instead of the gallows. It is in vain that human ambition endeavours to disguise its truculence under the robes of a specious rhetoric villainy remains villainy for ever. But Frederick was freed, or endeavoured to be so, from the bonds which Christians at once profess to wear, and yet ignore at their will and convenience. He laughed at all ideas of revealed religion, scoffed with Voltaire, who was his guest at Sans Souci, at the immortality of the soul, and persuaded himself that his battle of poison could