This intensity of religious
differences embittered the struggle for the mastery of the new
continent.
The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada. Yet
Canada was long able to wage war on something like equal terms.
She had the supreme advantage of a single control. There was no
trouble at Quebec about getting a reluctant legislature to vote
money for war purposes. No semblance of an elected legislature
existed and the money for war came not from the Canadians, but
from the capacious, if now usually depleted, coffers of the
French court at Versailles. In the English colonies the
legislatures
preferred, of all political struggles, one about money with the
Governor, the representative of the King. At least one of the
English colonies, Pennsylvania, believing that evil is best
conquered by non-resistance, was resolutely against war for any
reason, good or bad. Other colonies often raised the more sordid
objection that they were too poor to help in war. The colonial
legislatures, indeed, with their eternal demand for the
privileges and rights which the British House of Commons had won
in the long centuries of its history, constitute the most
striking of all the contrasts with Canada.
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