a congress of delegates chosen by the assemblies of the colonies. Franklin proposed the very same thing. Coxe would have each colony send two delegates annually elected. Franklin would have from two to seven delegates triennially elected. By each the governor-general was given a veto. By each the grand council, with consent of the governor-general, was to determine the quotas of men, money, and provisions the colonies should contribute to the common defense. The difference between them is a difference in detail, not in plan. The detail belongs to Franklin. The plan must be ascribed to Coxe.

Excellent as the Albany plan was, the colonies and the home government alike rejected it no unity of action followed; and the war, which a little energy, a little unity, would soon have ended, dragged on for nine years.

And now that the colonies could devise no scheme for defending themselves, the king determined to defend them, and entrusted the task to Edmund Braddock. Doomed to meet with a terrible fate, he landed at Alexandria in 1755, marched to Fredericktown, and scoured the country for horses, wagons, and army supplies. No sooner was his arrival in Virginia known, than Franklin was sent by the assembly of Pennsylvania to explain why they still per

sisted in refusing supplies. He performed the mission with his usual tact and skill, and quit the camp with a contract in his pocket to furnish horses, wagons, drivers, and a pack-train to the army of the king. To persuade the farmers of Lancaster and York to part with their beasts in such a cause was no easy thing. But he knew his men, and in a very carefully worded address so tempted their greed and roused their fear, that in less than a fortnight the teams and wagons set out for the camp at Wills Creek.

For this he was thanked by the assembly and praised by the people, who soon gave him an opportunity to serve them again. In the ruin which overwhelmed the army of Braddock, the whole frontier was left exposed. The expedition against Niagara got no further than Oswego. The expedition against Crown Point stopped at the foot of Lake George. Stirred up by the French, and excited by victory, the Indians hurried eastward, and by November were burning, plundering, scalping, massacring, within eighty miles of Philadelphia. Bethlehem was threatened, Gnadenhutten was laid waste. In Lancaster and Easton, men trembled for their lives. To overawe the governor, the assembly, the Quakers, and compel them to put the province in a state of defense, the

mangled bodies of a family the Indians had killed were carried about the city in an open cart, and laid out before the state-house door. The Quakers had long refused either to fight themselves, or furnish the means for others to fight. The governor would approve no tax levy from which the proprietary estates were not expressly exempt. The assembly would pass no tax-bill in which the lands of the proprietaries were not included. But, in the terrible days that followed the news of Braddock's defeat, all parties began to give way. The Penns bade their treasurer add five thousand pounds to any sum the assembly raised for purposes of defense. The assembly voted sixty thousand pounds, named Franklin one of seven commissioners for expending it, and hurried through a militia bill which Franklin prepared. The preamble exempted Quakers from bearing arms. Numbers of men would not in consequence enlist. They would not, they said, fight for men who would not fight for them. To shame them, Franklin again. had recourse to his pen, and wrote "A Dialogue between X, Y and Z concerning the present State of Affairs in Pennsylvania," and published it in the "Gazette."

The effect of the "Dialogue" seems to have been considerable, and when, in the middle of

December, a call was made for troops to defend the frontier, five hundred and forty men responded. Franklin accepted the command, and, with his son William as aid-de-camp, set out for the ruins of Gnadenhutten. There he passed two months hunting Indians and building forts, till urgent letters came from his friends and from the governor begging him to return. The assembly was soon to meet. The old quarrel was to be renewed, and Franklin could not be spared.

But the assembly met, adjourned, and met again, and a new governor came out from England before the crisis was reached. It was in December, 1756, that the patience of the assembly, so long and sorely tried, gave way. The affairs of the colonies were desperate. The French had taken Oswego and Fort George and razed them to the ground. The expedition against Ticonderoga had come to naught. That up the Kennebec had done no better. Fort Duquesne had not surrendered, while the fort and settlement at Grenville had been sacked. The whole frontier of Pennsylvania, indeed, was unprotected. Meantime the treasury was empty, and the foe more bold and insolent than ever. To meet the needs of the hour, the assembly now laid a tax of £60,000, and to make it acceptable to the governor laid it, not on

the Penn estate, but on wine, rum, brandy, and liquors. But the governor would not consent. A conference followed, the bill came back to the house, and with it came the tart assurance that he would send his reasons to the king.

Then the assembly for the first time began to act and to speak boldly. They ordered such a money bill to be prepared as the governor would sign. They resolved to send home a remonstrance setting forth the evils that would come on Pennsylvania if governed, not by the laws and charters, but by the instructions of the Penns, and they chose two members to represent the province in England. Isaac Norris refused to serve. But Franklin accepted, and the next five years of his life were spent in England.