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leaves when hordes of savages stole from their villages and laid waste the frontier posts. In quick succession fell Sandusky and St. Joseph, and the Miamis forts, and Niagara and Venango, and Michilimackinac and Presque Isle. Pontiac himself besieged Detroit. The people of Le Boeuf quit their village and fled for their lives. The Indians, sweeping eastward, attacked Fort Pitt. Scalping parties raided the whole western border of Pennsylvania, burning, sacking, murdering everywhere. Thousands of settlers, leaving everything behind them, fled to Carlisle. Hundreds more sought safety in the woods that lined the Susquehanna. The whole state was in commotion, but nowhere was the alarm greater than among the Scotch-Irish of Lancaster. Scattered among them here and there were little bands of red men the Moravian missionaries had persuaded to accept the name of Christ. Some were at Bethlehem ; some were at Nazareth; some had been assigned lands on the Manor of Conestoga. There, under the influence of the missionaries they became the most harmless and innocent of men; put off paint and feathers; put on hats and clothes, adopted English habits, English names, English speech, and learned to make, for a living, baskets and brooms. But to the Scotch-Irishmen of Lancaster they were

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.

CHAPTER VI.

1756-1764.

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terms. The Whigs, with Pitt at their head, were for a vigorous prosecution of the war; and no Pittite believed more firmly in this policy than Franklin, and believing in it he wrote in its defense.

He pretended that, while ransacking the old book-stalls, he had found a book printed at London in 1629. The cover was gone; the titlepage was wanting. But he believed the work was written by a Jesuit, and addressed to some king of Spain. Reading it over, he was struck to see how aptly the remarks in one of the chapters applied to present affairs. It was the thirty-fourth, and bore the heading, “On the Meanes of disposing the Enemie to Peace." War, the Jesuit said, with whatsoever prudence carried on, did not always succeed. The best designs were often overthrown by famine, pestilence, and storm; so that enemies at first weak became by these helps strong, made conquests, and, puffed with success, refused to make peace but on their own harsh terms. Yet it was possible by dexterous management to get back all that had been lost by the cross accidents of war. If the minds of the enemy could only be changed, they would often give up, willingly and for nothing, more than could be obtained by force. Now this change of mind, particularly in England, might be se

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