might be employed as engineers and officers to enlist a regiment of aliens. Indented servants might be accepted, and their masters were referred for compensation to the respective assemblies; and the naval code of England was extended to all persons employed in the king's service on the lakes, great waters, or rivers of North America. The militia law of Pennsylvania was repealed by the king in council; the commissions of all officers elected under it were cancelled; the companies themselves were broken up and dispersed. And, while volunteers were not allowed to organize themselves for defence, the humble intercession of the Quakers with the Delawares, the little covenants resting on confidence and ratified by presents, peaceful stipulations for the burial of the tomahawk and the security of the frontier fireside and the cradle, were censured by Lord Halifax as the most daring violation of the royal prerogative. Each northern province, also, was forbidden to negotiate with the Indians; and their relations were intrusted to Sir William Johnson, with no subordination but to Loudoun.

Yet all could not prevail. "In a few years," said one, who, after a long settlement in New England, had just returned home, the colonies of "America will be independent of Britain;" and at least one voice was raised to advise the sending out of Duke William of Cumberland to be their sovereign and emancipating them at once.

William Smith, the semi-republican historian of New York, insisted that "the board of trade did not know the state of America ;" and he urged a law for an American union with an American parliament. "The defects of the first plan," said he, "will be supplied by experience. The British constitution ought to be the model; and, from our knowledge of its faults, the American one may rise with more health and soundness in its first contexture than Great Britain will ever enjoy."

CHAPTER X.

THE WHIG ARISTOCRACY CANNOT GOVERN ENGLAND. NEWCASTLE'S ADMINISTRATION CONTINUED.

1756-1757.

WAR was not declared by England till May, though her navy was all the while despoiling the commerce of France. On the avowal of hostilities, she forbade neutral vessels to carry merchandise belonging to her antagonist. Frederic of Prussia had insisted that, "by the law of nations, the goods of an enemy cannot be taken from on board the ships of a friend;" that free ships make free goods. Against this interpretation of public law, Murray, citing ancient usage against the lessons of wiser times, gave the elaborate opinion which formed the basis of English policy and admiralty law, that the effects of an enemy can be seized on board the vessel of a friend. This may be proved by authority, said the illustrious jurist, not knowing that humanity appeals from the despotic and cruel precedents of the past to the more intelligent and more humane spirit of advancing civilization. War is a trial of force, not a system of spoliation. Neutral nations believed in their right "to carry in their vessels, unmolested, the property" of belligerents; but Britain, to give efficacy to her naval power, "seized on the enemy's property which she found on board neutral ships." With the same view, she arbitrarily invaded the sovereignty of Holland, capturing its vessels whose cargoes hight be useful for her navy. The treaties between Engand and Holland stipulated expressly that free ships should ake free goods; that the neutral should enter safely and molested all the harbors of the belligerents, unless they were blockaded or besieged; that the contraband of war

should be strictly limited to arms, artillery, and horses, and should not include materials for ship-building. But Great Britain, in the exercise of its superior strength, prohibited the commerce of the Netherlands in naval stores; denied them the right to become the carriers of French colonial products; and declared all the harbors of France in a state of blockade, and all vessels bound to them lawful prizes. Such was the rule of 1756. "To charge England with ambition," said Charles Jenkinson, an Oxford scholar, who had given up the thought of entering the church, and hoped for success in public life, "to charge England with ambition must appear so absurd to all who understand the nature of her government, that at the bar of reason it ought to be treated rather as calumny than accusation." The grave confidence of his discourse was by his own countrymen deemed conclusive; but the maritime assumptions of England were turning against her the sympathies of the civilized world.

April was almost gone before Abercrombie, who was to be next in command to the Earl of Loudoun, with Webb and two battalions, sailed from Plymouth for New York. Loudoun waited for his transports, that were to carry tents, ammunition, artillery, and intrenching tools; and at last, near the end of May, sailed without them. The man-ofwar, which bore one hundred thousand pounds to reimburse the colonies for the expenses of 1755, and stimulate their activity for 1756, did not sail till the middle of June. The cannon for ships on Lake Ontario did not reach America till August. "We shall have good reason to sing Te Deum, at the conclusion of this campaign," wrote the lieutenantgovernor of Maryland, "if matters are not then in a worse situation than they are at present."

On the fifteenth of June arrived the forty German officers who were to raise recruits for Loudoun's royal American regiment of four thousand. At the same time came Abercrombie. Letters awaited him in praise of Washington. "Be pleased to acquaint Colonel Washington," so wrote Shirley, while still first in command of the army in America, to the governor of Maryland, "that the appointment of him to the

second command in the proposed expedition upon the Ohio will give me great satisfaction and pleasure; that I know no provincial officer upon this continent to whom I would so readily give it as to himself; that I shall do it, if there is nothing in the king's orders, which I am in continual expectation of, that interferes with it." "He is a very deserving gentleman," wrote Dinwiddie, "and has from the beginning commanded the forces of this dominion. He is much beloved, has gone through many hardships in the service, has great merit, and can raise more men here than any one." He therefore urged his promotion in the British establishment; but England trusted foreigners rather than Americans.

On the twenty-fifth, Abercrombie reached Albany, intent that the regular officers should command the provincials, and that the troops should be quartered on private houses. The next day, Shirley acquainted him with the state of Oswego, advising that two battalions should be sent forward for its protection. The boats were ready, every magazine along the passage plentifully supplied; but the general could meditate only on triumphs of authority. "The great, the important day for Albany dawned." On the twentyseventh, "in spite of every subterfuge, the soldiers were at last billeted upon the town." After this, Abercrombie loitered at Albany; ordering a survey of it, that it might be ditched and stockaded round.

On the twelfth of July, the brave Bradstreet returned from Oswego, having thrown into the fort six months' provision for five thousand men, and a great quantity of stores. He brought intelligence that a French army was in motion to attack the place; and Webb, with the forty-fourth regiment, was ordered to hold himself in readiness to march to its defence. But nothing was done. The regiments of New England, with the provincials from New York and New Jersey, amounted to more than seven thousand men; with the British regular regiments, to more than ten thousand men, besides the garrison at Oswego. In the previous year, the road had been opened, the forts erected. But Abercrombie was still at Albany, when, on the twenty-ninth, the

Earl of Loudoun arrived. There, too, "the viceroy" wasted time with the rest; doing nothing, having ten or twelve thousand men at his disposition; keeping the provincials idle in their camps, victims to disease, which want of employment and close quarters generated.

The French had been more active. While the savages made inroads to the borders of Ulster and Orange counties, De Lery, leaving Montreal in March with a party of more than three hundred men, hastened over ice and snow along the foot of mountains; by roads known to red men alone, they penetrated to Fort Bull, at the Oneida portage; gained it after a short struggle and a loss of three men, destroyed its stores, and returned with thirty prisoners to Montreal. Near the end of May, eight hundred men, led by the intrepid and prudent De Villiers, made their palisaded camp under the shelter of a thicket near the mouth of Sandy Creek, whence little parties, hovering round the passes of Onondaga River, intercepted supplies for Oswego.

Of the Six Nations, the four lower ones, the Onondagas, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Mohawks, sent thirty of their chiefs to Montreal to solicit neutrality. "Our young braves," they were answered, "seek their foes wherever they are to be found; but, if you do not join the English, they shall not harm you;" and the envoys of the neutral tribes returned laden with presents.

Just then, the field-marshal Marquis de Montcalm arrived at Quebec; a man of a strong and well-stored memory; of a quick and highly cultivated mind; of small stature; rapid in thought and in conversation; and of restless mobility. He was accompanied by the Chevalier de Levis Leran, and by Bourlamarque, colonel of infantry. Travelling day and night, he hurried to Fort Carillon, at Ticonderoga; by two long marches on foot, he made himself familiar with the ground, and took measures for improving its defences. He next resolved by secrecy and celerity to take Oswego. Collecting at Montreal three regiments from Quebec, and a large body of Canadians and Indians, on the fifth of August he reviewed his troops at Frontenac, and on the evening of the same day anchored in Sackett's Harbor.