The session began.  Again, somewhat oddly, yet forcibly, the Governor set before the Assembly the peril of the situation, and begged them to postpone less pressing questions to the exigency of the hour.[142] This time they listened; and voted ten thousand pounds in Virginia currency to defend the frontier.  The grant was frugal, and they jealously placed its expenditure in the hands of a committee of their own.[143] Dinwiddie, writing to the Lords of Trade, pleads necessity as his excuse for submitting to their terms.  “I am sorry,” he says, “to find them too much in a republican way of thinking.”  What vexed him still more was their sending an agent to England to complain against him on the irrepressible question of the pistole fee; and he writes to his London friend, the merchant Hanbury:  “I have had a great deal of trouble from the factious disputes and violent heats of a most impudent, troublesome party here in regard to that silly fee of a pistole.  Surely every thinking man will make a distinction between a fee and a tax.  Poor people!  I pity their ignorance and narrow, ill-natured spirits.  But, my friend, consider that I could by no means give up this fee without affronting the Board of Trade and the Council here who established it.”  His thoughts were not all of this harassing nature, and he ends his letter with the following petition:  “Now, sir, as His Majesty is pleased to make me a military officer, please send for Scott, my tailor, to make me a proper suit of regimentals, to be here by His Majesty’s birthday.  I do not much like gayety in dress, but I conceive this necessary.  I do not much care for lace on the coat, but a neat embroidered button-hole; though you do not deal that way, I know you have a good taste, that I may show my friend’s fancy in that suit of clothes; a good laced hat and two pair stockings, one silk, the other fine thread."[144]

[Footnote 142:  Speech of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses 14 Feb., 1754.]

[Footnote 143:  See the bill in Hening, Statutes of Virginia, VI. 417.]

[Footnote 144:  Dinwiddie to Hanbury, 12 March, 1754; Ibid., 10 May, 1754.]

If the Governor and his English sometimes provoke a smile, he deserves admiration for the energy with which he opposed the public enemy, under circumstances the most discouraging.  He invited the Indians to meet him in council at Winchester, and, as bait to attract them, coupled the message with a promise of gifts.  He sent circulars from the King to the neighboring governors, calling for supplies, and wrote letter upon letter to rouse them to effort.  He wrote also to the more distant governors, Delancey of New York, and Shirley of Massachusetts, begging them to make what he called a “faint” against Canada, to prevent the French from sending so large a force to the Ohio.  It was to the nearer colonies, from New Jersey to South Carolina, that he looked for direct aid; and their several governors were all more