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cleared a road for our brothers, the English; and your fathers have made it foul, and have taken some of our brothers prisoners." They had seized three at the Huron village near Detroit, and one on the Wabash. "This," added the king, "we look upon as done to us;" and, turning suddenly from them, he strode out of the council. At this, the representative of the French, an Ottawa, wept and howled, predicting sorrow for the Miamis.

To the English, the Weas and Piankeshaws, after deliberation, sent a speech by the great orator of the Weas. "You have taken us by the hand," were his words, “into the great chain of friendship. Therefore we present you with these two bundles of skins to make shoes for your people, and this pipe to smoke in, to assure you our hearts are good towards you, our brothers."

In the presence of the Ottawa ambassadors, the great war-chief of Picqua stood up, and, summoning in imagination the French to be present, he spoke: "Fathers! you have desired we should go home to you, but I tell you it is not our home; for we have made a path to the sun-rising, and have been taken by the hand by our brothers, the English, the Six Nations, the Delawares, the Shawnees, and the Wyandots; and, we assure you, in that road we will go. And, as you threaten us with war in the spring, we tell you, if you are angry, we are ready to receive you, and resolve to die here, before we will go to you. That you may know this is our mind, we send you this string of black wampum.

"Brothers, the Ottawas, you hear what I say: tell that to your fathers, the French; for that is our mind, and we speak it from our hearts."

The French colors are taken down; the Ottawas are dismissed to the French fort at Sandusky. The Long House, late the senate-chamber of the united Miamis, rings with the music and the riotous motions of the feather-dance. A war-chief strikes a post: the music ceases, and the dancers, on the instant, are hushed to silent listeners; the brave recounts his deeds in war, and proves the greatness of his mind by throwing presents lavishly to the musicians and the dancers. Then the turmoil of joy is renewed, till an

other warrior rises to boast his prowess, and scatter gifts in his turn.

Thus February came to an end. On the first day of March, Gist took his leave. The Miamis, resolving never to give heed to the words of the French, sent beyond the Alleghanies this message: "Our friendship shall stand like the loftiest mountain."

The agent of the Ohio company gazed with rapture on the valley of the Great Miami, "the finest meadows that can be." He was told that the land was not less fertile to the very head-springs of the river, and west to the Wabash. He descended to the Ohio by way of the Little Miami, still finding many "clear fields," where herds of forty or fifty buffaloes were feeding together on the wonderfully tall grasses. When within fifteen miles of the falls at Louisville, he checked his perilous course; and taking with him, as a trophy, the tooth of a mammoth, then a novel wonder, he passed up the valley of the Kentucky River, and, through a continuous ledge of rocks and almost inaccessible hills and laurel thickets, found a path to the Bluestone. He paused, on his way, to climb what is now called "The Hawk's Nest," whence he could "see the Kanawha burst through the next high mountain ;" and having proposed the union, and appointed at Logstown a meeting of the Mingoes, the Delawares, the Wyandots, the Shawnees, and the Miami nations, with the English, he returned to his employers by way of the Yadkin and the Roanoke.

In April, 1751, Croghan again repaired to the Ohio Indians. The half-king, as the chief of the mixed tribe on the branches of the Ohio was called, in token of his subordination to the Iroquois confederacy, reported that the news of the expedition under Celoron had swayed the Onondaga council to allow the English to establish a trading-house; and a belt of wampum invited Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, to build a fort at the forks of Monongahela.

CHAPTER IV.

AMERICA REFUSES TO BE RULED BY ARBITRARY INSTRUCTIONS. PELHAM'S ADMINISTRATION CONTINUED.

1751-1753.

THE British ministry, engrossed by intrigues at home, gave little heed to the glorious country beyond the Alleghanies. Having failed in the attempt to subject the colonies by act of parliament to all future orders of the king, the lords of trade sought to gain the same end in detail. Rhode Island, a charter government, of which the laws were valid without the assent of the king, continued to emit paper currency; and the more freely, because Massachusetts had withdrawn its notes and returned to hard money. In 1742, twenty-eight shillings of Rhode Island currency would have purchased an ounce of silver; seven years afterwards, it required sixty shillings: compared with sterling money, the depreciation was as ten and a half or eleven to one. This was pleaded as the justification of the board of trade, who, in March, 1751, presented a bill to restrain bills of credit in New England, with an additional clause giving the authority of law to the king's instructions on that subject. In "the dangerous precedent," Bollan, the agent for Massachusetts, discerned the latent purpose of introducing by degrees the same authority to control other articles. He argued, moreover, that "the province had a natural and lawful right to make use of its credit for its defence and preservation." New York also urged "the benefit of a paper credit." Before the bill was engrossed, the obnoxious clause was abandoned. Yet there seemed to exist in the minds of " some persons of consequence" a fixed design of getting a parliamentary sanction to the

king's instructions; and the scheme was conducted with great perseverance and art.

Meantime, parliament, on the motion of Lord Chesterfield, changed the commencement of the year, and regulated the calendar for all the British dominions. As the earth and the moon, in their annual rounds, differed by eleven days from the English reckoning of time, the legislature of a Protestant kingdom, after centuries of obstinacy, submitted to be taught by the heavens, and adopted the calendar as amended by a pope of Rome.

The board of trade was all the while maturing its scheme for an American civil list. The royal prerogative was still the mainspring in their system. With Bedford's approbation, they advised the appointment of a new governor for New York, with a stricter commission and instructions; the New York legislature should be ordered to grant a permanent revenue, to be disbursed by royal officers, and sufficient for Indian presents, as well as for the civil list. At the same time, it was resolved to obtain an American revenue by acts of parliament. The discriminating duties in favor of the British West Indies, "given and granted" by parliament in 1733, on the products of the foreign West India Islands imported into the continental colonies, were prohibitory, and had never been collected. The trade was pursued with no more than an appearance of disguise; and Newcastle, who escaped from the solicitations and importunities of the British West Indians by conceding the law, avoided the reproaches of the colonists by never enforcing it.

This forbearance is, in part, also, due to the moderation which marked the character of Sir Robert Walpole. He rejected the proposition for a colonial stamp-tax, being content with the tribute to British wealth from colonial commerce; and he held that the American evasions of the acts of trade, by enriching the colonies, did but benefit England, which was their final mart; but can a minister excuse his own acts of despotic legislation by his neglect to enforce them? The administration of Sir Robert Walpole had left English statutes and American practice more at variance than ever.

Woe to the British statesman who should hold it a duty to give effect to the British laws!

In 1740, Ashley, a well-informed writer, had proposed to establish a fund by such "an abatement of the duty on molasses imported into the northern colonies" as would make it cease to be prohibitory. Opinions were changing on the subject of a stamp-tax; and the board of trade, in 1751, entered definitively on the policy of regulating trade, so as to uproot illicit traffic, and, under the guise of lenity, obtain an American revenue by the collection of more moderate imposts.

But the interposition of parliament was delayed; for the intrigue to drive Bedford from the cabinet had come to maturity. His neglect of the forms of office had vexed the king; his independence of character had offended the king's mistress. Sandwich, his friend, was dismissed from the admiralty. Admitted in June to an audience at court, Bedford inveighed long and vehemently against his treacherous colleague, and resigned. His successor was the Earl of Holdernesse, a very courtly peer, proud of his rank, formal, and of talents which could not disquiet Newcastle or alarm America. Besides, no energetic system of colonial administration could be adopted, without the aid of the friends of Bedford.

During these changes, everybody shunned the charge of securing the valley of the Ohio. Of the Virginia company the means were limited. The assembly of Pennsylvania, from motives of economy, refused to ratify the treaty which Croghan had negotiated at Picqua; while the proprietaries of that province denied their liability "to contribute to Indian or any other expenses," and sought to cast the burden of a western fort on the equally reluctant "people of Virginia." New York could but remonstrate with the governor of Canada.

At the appointed time in July, the deputies of the Six Nations came down to Albany to renew their covenant chain, and to chide the inaction of the English. When the congress, which Clinton had invited to meet the Iroquois, assembled at Albany, South Carolina came, for the first time,

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