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

[176] Morris, ‘because a future Assembly may use those

chap. VII.} 1755.

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. ‘Redress,’ said the Pennsylvania royalists, ‘if it comes, must come from his Majesty and the British parliament.’¹ The Quakers also looked to the same authority, not for taxation, but for the abolition of the proprietary rule.²

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