Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/26

 of France that might have grasped India was broken by the shock of Frederick the Great's picked Prussian troops on the battlefields of Europe.

The political condition of the Continent, as well as its undying rivalries, was another factor that favored English colonial success. In the seventeenth century, all eastern Europe was landlocked and slumbering in ancient customs or engaged in local conflicts that had little or no bearing on trade and empire. Central Europe—the geographical region now occupied by Germany, Austria, Italy, and a number of minor states—was in chaos. Germany was an aggregation of petty feudal domains from which Prussia was just emerging under Hohenzollern mastery. Italy was not a nation, merely a "geographical expression"—a collection of warring principalities and jealous cities.

For various reasons, moreover, the Atlantic powers that might have frustrated English colonial designs were not prepared to supply people of their own stock to possess the soil of the New World. Though the Dutch were full of zeal and enterprise in both hemispheres, they were primarily traders, and the Hudson Valley, which was to be their New Netherland, was wrested from them by the English sea power. France had a population many times that of England, her people were ardent explorers, skillful traders in distant markets, and shrewd managers in commerce; but French monarchs wasted their substance in interminable wars on the Continent which promised the addition of new principalities or the aggrandizement of their families. The people, the money, the labor that might have made New France a living reality instead of a mere dream, were destroyed in futile fighting which yielded neither glory nor profit. Moreover, when in 1685 the French king outlawed all his Protestant subjects, he even denied them a haven in his American dominions.

Spain, whose warriors carried her flag around the world and whose missionaries counted no barrier insurmountable, was also a feudal and clerical power rather than a com-