George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[74]

The territory which is now Vermont was equally

chap. III.} 1750.

in dispute. New York carried its limits to the Connecticut River, as a part of its jurisdiction; France, which alone had command of Lake Champlain, extended her pretensions to the crest of the Green Mountains; while Wentworth, the only royal governor in New England, began to convey the soil between the Connecticut and Lake Champlain by grants under the seal of New Hampshire.

A deeper interest hung over the valley of the Ohio. What language shall be the mother tongue of its future millions? What race, the Romanic or the Teutonic, shall form the seed of its people? The Six Nations expressed alarm for their friends and allies on the Ohio, against whom the French were making preparations, and asked what reliance they might place on the protection of New York. After concert with the governor of Pennsylvania, Clinton, in September, 1750, appealed to the Assembly for means to confirm their Indian alliances, and to assist Pennsylvania ‘in securing the fidelity of the Indians on Ohio River.’¹ The Assembly refused; and the Onondagas, whose chief was a professed Roman Catholic, whose castles contained a hundred neophytes, whose warriors glittered in brave apparel from France, scoffed with one another at the parsimonious colonists.²

The tendency of the Americans themselves towards union, and the desire on the part of England to concentrate its power over the colonies by the aid of