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

Thus, while France, with the unity of a despotic central power, was employing all its strength in Canada to make good its claims to an extended frontier, Halifax signalized his coming into office by planting Protestant emigrants in Nova Scotia, as a barrier against encroachments on the North East, and by granting lands for a Virginia colony on both banks of the Ohio, in order to take possession of the valley of the Mississippi. With still greater impetuosity he rushed precipitately towards an arbitrary solution of all the accumulated difficulties in the administration of the colonies.

Long experience having proved that American assemblies insisted on the right of deliberating freely on all subjects respecting which it was competent for them to legislate, the Board of Trade, so soon as Halifax had become its head, revived and earnestly promoted the scheme of strengthening the authority of the prerogative by a general act of the British parliament. At its instance, on the third day of March,² 1749, under the pretext of suppressing the flagrant evils of colonial paper-money, the disappointed Horatio Walpole, who, for nearly thirty years,³ had