you prevented us.  Instead, you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from it,—­which was a shame and a scandal to you.  Look about your country and see:  you have no fortifications; no, not even in this city.  It is but a step from Canada hither, and the French may come and turn you out of doors.  You desire us to speak from the bottom of our hearts, and we shall do it.  Look at the French:  they are men; they are fortifying everywhere.  But you are all like women, bare and open, without fortifications."[177]

[Footnote 176:  Circular Letter of Lords of Trade to Governors in America, 18 Sept. 1753.  Lords of Trade to Sir Danvers Osborne, in N.Y.  Col.  Docs., VI. 800.]

[Footnote 177:  Proceedings of the Congress at Albany, N.Y.  Col.  Docs., VI. 853.  A few verbal changes, for the sake of brevity, are made in the above extracts.]

Hendrick’s brother Abraham now took up the word, and begged that Johnson might be restored to the management of Indian affairs, which he had formerly held; “for,” said the chief, “we love him and he us and he has always been our good and trusty friend.”  The commissioners had not power to grant the request, but the Indians were assured that it should not be forgotten; and they returned to their villages soothed, but far from satisfied.  Nor were the commissioners empowered to take any effective steps for fortifying the frontier.

The congress now occupied itself with another matter.  Its members were agreed that great danger was impending; that without wise and just treatment of the tribes, the French would gain them all, build forts along the back of the British colonies, and, by means of ships and troops from France, master them one by one, unless they would combine for mutual defence.  The necessity of some form of union had at length begun to force itself upon the colonial mind.  A rough woodcut had lately appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, figuring the provinces under the not very flattering image of a snake cut to pieces, with the motto, “Join, or die.”  A writer of the day held up the Five Nations for emulation, observing that if ignorant savages could confederate, British colonists might do as much.[178] Franklin, the leading spirit of the congress, now laid before it his famous project of union, which has been too often described to need much notice here.  Its fate is well known.  The Crown rejected it because it gave too much power to the colonies; the colonies, because it gave too much power to the Crown, and because it required each of them to transfer some of its functions of self-government to a central council.  Another plan was afterwards devised by the friends of prerogative, perfectly agreeable to the King, since it placed all power in the hands of a council of governors, and since it involved compulsory taxation of the colonists, who, for the same reasons, would have doggedly resisted it, had an attempt been made to carry it into effect.[179]