gave five thousand pounds to aid Virginia.[172] Maryland, after long delay, gave six thousand.  New Jersey felt herself safe behind the other colonies, and would give nothing.  New England, on the other hand, and especially Massachusetts, had suffered so much from French war-parties that they were always ready to fight.  Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, had returned from his bootless errand to settle the boundary question at Paris.  His leanings were strongly monarchical; yet he believed in the New Englanders, and was more or less in sympathy with them.  Both he and they were strenuous against the French, and they had mutually helped each other to reap laurels in the last war.  Shirley was cautious of giving umbrage to his Assembly, and rarely quarrelled with it, except when the amount of his salary was in question.  He was not averse to a war with France; for though bred a lawyer, and now past middle life, he flattered himself with hopes of a high military command.  On the present occasion, making use of a rumor that the French were seizing the carrying-place between the Chaudiere and the Kennebec, he drew from the Assembly a large grant of money, and induced them to call upon him to march in person to the scene of danger.  He accordingly repaired to Falmouth (now Portland); and, though the rumor proved false, sent eight hundred men under Captain John Winslow to build two forts on the Kennebec as a measure of precaution.[173]

[Footnote 171:  Address of the Assembly to Lieutenant-Governor Delancey, 23 April, 1754.  Lords of Trade to Delancey, 5 July, 1754.]

[Footnote 172:  Delancey to Lords of Trade, 8 Oct. 1754.]

[Footnote 173:  Massachusetts Archives, 1754.  Hutchinson, III. 26. Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated.  Journals of the Board of Trade, 1754.]

While to these northern provinces Canada was an old and pestilent enemy, those towards the south scarcely knew her by name; and the idea of French aggression on their borders was so novel and strange that they admitted it with difficulty.  Mind and heart were engrossed in strife with their governors:  the universal struggle for virtual self-rule.  But the war was often waged with a passionate stupidity.  The colonist was not then an American; he was simply a provincial, and a narrow one.  The time was yet distant when these dissevered and jealous communities should weld themselves into one broad nationality, capable, at need, of the mightiest efforts to purge itself of disaffection and vindicate its commanding unity.

In the interest of that practical independence which they had so much at heart, two conditions were essential to the colonists.  The one was a field for expansion, and the other was mutual help.  Their first necessity was to rid themselves of the French, who, by shutting them between the Alleghanies and the sea, would cramp them into perpetual littleness.  With France on their backs, growing while they had no room to grow,