Page:Public School History of England and Canada (1892).djvu/152

 The French also had a company in India which had built a fort at Pondieherry. The English and French traders were very jealous of each other, and sometimes their mutual dislike led to fighting, even when England and France were at peace. At last, Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry, formed a scheme of driving the English out of India, and of obtaining for France the control of Indian affairs. His plan was to take advantage of the frequent quarrels among the many native rulers of India, to play off one ruler against the other, and so, in the end, get the control of Southern India. To carry out his plans, it was necessary that the English should be driven out of the country, and this he proceeded to do by attacking and capturing Madras. For a time it seemed as if the English must submit, when the whole aspect of affairs was changed by the skill in war and vigor of a young man in the East India Company’s service, Robert Clive. Clive had been sent to India as a clerk, his friends in England in this way hoping to rid themselves of a wild and troublesome youth. He now gave up his clerkship, and putting himself at the head of a few English and native troops defeated the French at Arcot, in 1751, and held the fort until assistance came. From that time onwards the French were driven back until Dupleix was recalled, and peace was made in 1754.

13. French and English in America.—A similar struggle for power and supremacy had been going on for many years in America between the English and French. Though there were intervals of peace between the French colonies in Canada and Acadia, and the English colonies to the south of them, yet an almost constant border warfare was carried on in which the North American Indians took an active part. The English and French colonists both wanted the sole right to trade in furs with the Indians, and often when England and France were at peace their colonies were keeping up a cruel warfare, and making attacks on each other's settlements. The French settlements were in what we now call Quebec and Nova Scotia, and in Louisiana, at the mouth of the Mississippi; while the English had thirteen colonies scattered along the eastern coast of North America. The French claimed the right to all the land west of the Alleghanies, and as that would have shut out the English fur-traders from a profitable trade with the numerous tribes of Indians in the north-