of May, however, he dropped a shell into the powder magazine of Fort St. George and after the explosion the Spaniards succeeded in getting possession of a wrecked redoubt, whence they turned field pieces upon the interior of the fort. Even while the Spaniards were preparing to deliver a final assault the white flag was run up. The terms of capitulation were signed on May 9th, and by them eight hundred men were made prisoners and the province of West Florida surrendered. These troops also were to be transported to an English port, and the rule of the Briton in Florida came to an end. Governor Chester, General Campbell, and the legislature at last found something in common, and if they still quarrelled it was without arms and without office, aboard an enemy's vessel bearing them to New York.

The results of this campaign were so striking as to be celebrated by Poydras in a poem, the earliest in Louisiana literature. The British were at first unable to realize them. On the Mississippi the soldiers had surrendered, but the colonists at Natchez were so satisfied that the reverse was temporary that in April they undertook to recapture Fort Panmure. They invested it, and by threat of mines managed to secure its surrender, but when they learned that all West Florida had really become Spanish they remembered Lafrénière and fled eastwardly toward Savannah, which was then in British hands. Their sufferings were indescribable, and all the fugitives did not survive. They had with them their wives and children, and those who did not die or were not captured by the American insurgents finally arrived at Savannah in the fall.

In coming into possession of West Florida, Spain had to determine what method of organization was to be pursued. Mobile had heretofore never been Spanish. It had been British for eighteen years, but in population was still largely creole, and there was no great difficulty in reconciling its inhabitants to accept the rule which the other parts of old Louisiana had found acceptable. Indeed, the Louisiana troops that had come to Mobile had found not a few friends,

if not kindred. At Pensacola the case was different, for even if the place was Spanish in name, the Spanish had migrated and the British had practically built the town over again. The cases were now reversed, although some British still remained in both places. The treaty of peace which followed in 1782 allowed them to remain if they chose to become Spanish subjects or within a certain length of time to sell their goods and retire. The Spanish government did not restore the old French boundaries of the country. Not even the Mobile district reverted to Louisiana, and West Florida remained under the Spaniards, as under the British, a separate province, and Pensacola was still a quasicapital, although the governor-general had his headquarters at New Orleans.

Spanish institutions were gradually introduced in the conquered provinces, Spanish customs superseded the English; and as many of the English had fled in consequence of the war, much land reverted to the government and was granted out anew. The commandants at Mobile and Pensacola had semi-independent powers and performed many of the functions of the old governors. But the main problem facing the new conquerors, as it did the earlier, was the Indian question, and it was not long before great congresses at Pensacola and Mobile gave the Spaniards as complete an influence and perhaps as great a power over the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws as had been enjoyed by the English before them.

As to the rest, West Florida became thoroughly Spanish, and yet if we could look forward into the future we should find that it did not prosper after the death of Charles III. Louisiana did, for it was fortunate enough finally to discover a way of utilizing the sugar cane. This had earlier produced only tafia, a cheap alcoholic drink hardly improving the morals of the country, and a coarse sugar which deliquesced too easily to admit of export. But at last Étienne de Boré discovered the process of crystallization, immortalizing himself and enriching his country.

Thus did the Latins enlarge their bounds, and when the Americans sought the aid of the court of Madrid they found that it could be purchased only at the cost of abandoning all right to the Mississippi. So far as Spain was concerned, the new republic was to be little more than what Iberville had earlier permitted; for West Florida had been conquered from the British, and the Americans had nothing to do with it one way or the other. The dominion of Spain once again swept around the Gulf of Mexico, and when Great Britain in 1783 surrendered East Florida also St. Augustine and the Atlantic coast up to the St. Mary's became Spanish once more. Only the claim to the Illinois was given up by Spain.

It looked as if the days of autocracy had returned. A paternal government may be strong in that it protects the rights of citizens and aids the development of the country, and this was the aim of the Spanish system; and still, like all others of its class, it was bound in the course of time to decay at the heart or give way to the rising popular tide. The only true strong government is that which rests not merely upon the consent of the people, but is really through representative forms carrying out the will of the people themselves. This will may be crude, but the whole people feel that it is their own will and in course of time they rise equal to their duties. This latter was the case with the English colonies on the Atlantic, the former that of LouisiThe popular element in the Spanish colonial system of which we have spoken was not such as to grow into a consciousness of participation in the government itself. It did not ripen into political rights, but left the people with a feeling that they had a way of addressing their sovereign, without any way of governing themselves. It produced, as was intended, a spirit of dependency. The French rule has been thought of as a bureaucracy, a kind of official aristocracy, in which absence from central control, aided by a division of authority in the province, developed a spirit. of peculation and, toward the last, almost of anarchy; the

ana.

Spanish in its outward manifestations was much more of a success. The people were content, and that was the difference between them and their Atlantic contemporaries. The British colonists were not content. They long anticipated Tennyson in preferring "fifty years of Europe to a cycle of Cathay." It was the secret of their progress.

Thus the Latin stood facing the Teuton. It was no longer across Mississippi and Iberville Rivers, for the Spanish conquest extended in an indefinite line from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Great Britain in recognizing the independence of the United States was to name the line of thirty-one degrees as bounding them on the south, while Spain said. that her conquest of West Florida carried the northern line above Natchez. With a Charles III. in Europe and a Galvez in Louisiana the claim would be maintained. On the other hand, if the United States were to be kept off Mississippi River and Georgia denied expansion to the west similar to that of Carolina and Virginia, the future was less promising. Much was to depend upon the growth of population. The English had outgrown England, and occupied the American coast. They seemed now about to outgrow the Atlantic coast, and, indeed, the interior up to the mountains, and but for the American Revolution, really an English civil war, there would have been no question as to the result. But again the map was changed. At the beginning Canada and Florida had been in alien hands, and after they had been conquered now again by results of this civil war they had come into alien hands, and the United States were bounded by foreign dominions to the north and foreign dominions to the south just as when they were colonies. Independence was a great boon, but it had apparently been purchased at great cost. The friendship which had arisen with Spain had helped the United States to attain their independence; but the claim of Spain to the Mississippi and to Florida. contained the germs of future conflict.

Spain went even further at first, and claimed that she had conquered the east half of the Mississippi valley and stood

in the position which France had occupied before the Treaty of Paris. Remembering what the Board of Trade had declared to be the policy of the crown under the proclamation of 1763, we cannot wonder that Spain should adopt the same view and consider the thirteen Atlantic colonies as bounded by the Alleghanies. England had fixed that western limit for her own purposes, and in capturing the leading posts west of the mountains Spain could fairly contend that she had conquered up to the limits recognized by Great Britain herself for her coast provinces. But if this obtained, the French wars had, so far as the American colonies were concerned, been fought in vain. This was to some extent adjusted by the treaties ending the American Revolution, but it was to revive under new forms. First was to come a dispute over the limits of West Florida, and then a long drawn out attempt by smiles and favors to seduce the transAlleghany settlements from their loyalty to the United States. We cannot follow these and can only notice here again a chance, if not a necessity, for future misunderstanding. In point of fact, America could not ultimately be half Latin and half Teuton. The wars with France must be carried to a legitimate conclusion. America must be either wholly Latin or wholly Anglo-Saxon.