THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA.
The Fight with France for North America. By A. G. Bradley. (A. Constable and Co. 10s. 6d.)—Mr. Bradley apologises almost superfluously for recalling to us at the present moment— although he assures us his work was begun before the war in South Africa had commenced—that "incomparable moment when the star of England shone with a lustre greater even than during the epoch that witnessed Waterloo and saw Napoleon carried in a British ship to St. Helena." Possibly he under- rates the size of the circle of English readers to whom the fascinating pages of the brilliant American, Francis Parkman, are known. But the general knowledge of in some respects the most remarkable racial struggle Great Britain has ever been engaged in is as slight as Mr. Bradley represents it to be. " Every schoolboy knows, or is popularly, though probably very erroneously, supposed to know, the details of the 'Plains of Abraham,' but I will undertake to say that there are many thousands of schoolmasters who have never so much as even heard of the still bloodier battle of St. Foy, fought upon the same ground within six months, by the same troops; while, so far as my experience goes, the memories of Braddock's defeat, Ticonderoga, or Louisburg are much more often than not of the haziest description, and sometimes are barely even memories in quarters where such recognition would be most expected." This is but true, and, therefore, believers in the old as well as in the new Imperialism ought to be grateful to Mr. Bradley for having revived the achievements of Amherst and Rogers, Laing and Johnson—although we are reminded rather too often that the last was a " backwoods baronet "—as well as of Wolfe. The surrender of Vaudreuil at Montreal in 1760 was quite as important as was the defeat of the incomparably nobler Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham about a year before. Mr. Bradley, who has an easy command of the materials he has mastered, writes as enthusiastic and almost as eloquent English as Macaulay. His account of the British warfare with the Red Indians is exceptionally good. It is pleasant to note that he is able to tone down the familiar picture of the unfortunate Braddock as "a corpulent, red-faced, blaspheming bulldog riding roughshod over colonial susceptibilities."
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