dition to the benefit to England from the increasing demand for English manufactures, the whole wealth of the colonies, by the British acts of trade, centred finally among the merchants and inhabitants of the metropolis.

Against taxation of the colonies by parliament, Franklin urged that it would lead to dangerous feuds and inevitable confusion; that parliament, being at a great distance, was subject to be misinformed and misled, and was therefore unsuited to the exercise of this power; that it was the undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent, through their representatives; that to propose taxation by parliament, rather than by a colonial representative body, implied a distrust of the loyalty or the patriotism or the understanding of the colonies; that to compel them to pay money without their consent would be rather like raising contributions in an enemy's country than taxing Englishmen for their own benefit; and, finally, that the principle involved in the measure would, if carried out, lead to a tax upon them all by act of parliament for support of government, and to the disuse of colonial assemblies, as a needless part of the constitution.

1754.

Dec.

Shirley next proposed the plan of uniting the colonies more intimately with Great Britain, by allowing them representatives in parliament; and Franklin replied, that unity of government should be followed by a real unity of country; that it would not be acceptable, unless a reasonable number of representatives were allowed, all laws restraining the trade or the manufactures of the colonies were repealed, and England, ceasing to regard the colonies as tributary to its industry, were to foster the merchant, the smith, the hatter in America not less than those on her own soil.

Unable to move Franklin from his convictions and the sentiment of his heart, Shirley renewed to the secretary of state his representations of the necessity of a union of the colonies, to be formed in England and enforced by act of parliament. At the same time, he warned against Franklin's Albany plan, which he described as the application of the old republican charter system, such as prevailed in Rhode

Island and Connecticut, to the formation of an American confederacy. The system, said he, is unfit for a particular colony; and much more unfit for a general government over all the united colonies.

1755.

Early in 1755, Shirley enforced to the secretary of state"the necessity not only of a parliamentary union, but taxation." During the winter, Sharpe, who had been appointed temporarily to the chief command in America, vainly solicited aid from every province. New Hampshire, although weak and young, "took every opportunity to force acts contrary to the king's instructions and prerogative." The character of the Rhode Island government gave 66 no great prospect of assistance." New York hesitated in providing quarters for British soldiers, and would contribute to a general fund only when others did. New Jersey showed "the greatest contempt " for the repeated solicitations of its aged governor. In Pennsylvania, in Maryland, in South Carolina, the grants of money by the assemblies were negatived, because they were connected with the encroachments of popular power on the prerogative, "schemes of future independency," "the grasping at the disposition of all public money and filling all offices;" and in each instance the veto excited a great flame. The assembly of Pennsylvania, in March, borrowed money and issued bills of credit by their own resolves, without the assent of the governor. "They are the more dangerous," said Morris, "because a future assembly may use those powers against the government by which they are now protected;" and he openly and incessantly solicited the interference of England. The provincial press engaged in the strife. dress," said the Pennsylvania royalists, "if it comes, must come from his majesty and the British parliament." The Quakers also looked to the same authority, not for taxation, but for the abolition of the proprietary rule.

"Re

The contest along the American frontier was raging fiercely, when, in January, 1755, France proposed to England to leave the Ohio valley as it was before the last war, and at the same time inquired the motive of the armament which was making in Ireland. Braddock, with two regi

ments, was already on the way to America, when Newcastle gave assurances that defence only was intended, that the general peace should not be broken; at the same time, England on its side, returning the French proposition with a change of epoch, proposed to leave the Ohio valley as it had been at the treaty of Utrecht. Mirepoix, in reply, was willing that both the French and English should retire from the country between the Ohio and the Alleghanies, and leave that territory neutral, which would have secured to his sovereign all the country north and west of the Ohio. England, on the contrary, demanded that France should destroy all her forts as far as the Wabash, raze Niagara and Crown Point, surrender the peninsula of Nova Scotia, with a strip of land twenty leagues wide along the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic, and leave the intermediate country to the St. Lawrence a neutral desert. Proposals so unreasonable could meet with no acceptance; yet both parties professed a desire, in which France appears to have been sincere, to investigate and arrange all disputed points; and Louis XV., while he sent three thousand men to America, held himself ready to sacrifice for peace all but honor and the protection due to his subjects; consenting that New England should reach on the east to the Penobscot, and be divided from Canada on the north by the crest of the intervening highlands.

While the negotiations were pending, Braddock arrived in the Chesapeake. In March, he reached Williamsburg, and visited Annapolis; on the fourteenth of 1755. April, he, with Commodore Keppel, held a congress at Alexandria. There were present, of the American governors, Shirley, next to Braddock in military rank; Delancey, of New York; Morris, of Pennsylvania; Sharpe, of Maryland ; and Dinwiddie, of Virginia. Braddock directed their attention, first of all, to the subject of a colonial revenue, on which his instructions commanded him to insist, and his anger kindled "that no such fund was already established." The governors present, recapitulating their strifes with their assemblies, made answer: "Such a fund can never be established in the colonies without the aid of parliament.

Having found it impracticable to obtain in their respective governments the proportion expected by his majesty towards defraying the expense of his service in North America, they are unanimously of opinion that it should be proposed to his majesty's ministers to find out some method of compelling them to do it, and of assessing the several governments in proportion to their respective abilities." This imposing document Braddock sent forthwith to the ministry, himself also urging the necessity of some tax being laid throughout his majesty's dominions in North America. Dinwiddie reiterated his old advice. Sharpe recommended that the governor and council, without the assembly, should have power to levy money "after any manner that may be deemed most ready and convenient." "A common fund," so Shirley assured his American colleagues, on the authority of the British secretary of state, "must be either voluntarily raised, or assessed in some other way."

1755.

I have had in my hands vast masses of correspondence, including letters from servants of the crown in every royal colony, in America; from civilians, as well as from Braddock and Dunbar and Gage; from the popular Delancey and the moderate Sharpe, as well as from Dinwiddie and Shirley; and all were of the same tenor. The British ministry heard one general clamor from men in office for taxation by act of parliament. Even men of liberal tendencies looked to acts of English authority for aid. "I hope that Lord Halifax's plan may be good and take place," said Alexander, of New York. Hopkins, governor of Rhode Island, elected by the people, complained of the men "who seemed to love and understand liberty better than public good and the affairs of state." "Little dependence," said he, "can be had on voluntary union." "In an act of parliament for a general fund," wrote Shirley, "I have great reason to think the people will readily acquiesce."

In England, the government was more and more inclined. to enforce the permanent authority of Great Britain. No assembly had with more energy assumed the management

1755.

of the provincial treasury than that of South Carolina; and Richard Lyttelton, brother of Sir George Lyttelton who, in November, 1755, became chancellor of the exchequer, was sent to recover the authority which had been impaired by "the unmanly facilities of former rulers." Pennsylvania had, in January, 1755, professed the loyalty of that province, and explained the danger to their chartered liberties from proprietary instructions; but, after a hearing before the board of trade, the address of the colonial legislature to their sovereign, like that of New York in the former year, was disdainfully rejected. Petitions for reimbursements and aids were received with displeasure; the people of New England were treated as Swiss ready to sell their services, desiring to be paid for protecting themselves. The reimbursement of Massachusetts for taking Louisburg was now condemned, as a subsidy to subjects who had only done their duty. "You must fight for your own altars and firesides," was Sir Thomas Robinson's answer to the American agents, as they were bandied to himself from Newcastle, and from both to Halifax. Halifax alone had decision and a plan. In July, 1755, he insisted with the ministry on a "general system to ease the mother country of the great and heavy expenses with which it of late years was burdened." The administration resolved "to raise funds for American affairs by a stamp duty, and a duty" on products of the foreign West Indies imported into the continental colonies. The English press advocated an impost in the northern colonies on West India products, "and likewise that, by act of parliament, there be a further fund established " from "stamped paper.' This tax, it was conceived, would yield "a very large sum." Huske, an American, writing under the patronage of Charles Townshend, urged a reform in the colonial administration, and moderate taxation by parliament, as free from "the risks and disadvantages of the Albany plan of union." Delancey, in August, had hinted to the New York assembly that a "stamp duty would be so diffused as to be in a manner insensible." That province objected to a stamp-tax as oppressive, though not to a moderate impost on West India

وو