a silken cord to hold him in time of war. "We would have
taken Crown Point, but you prevented us," said Chief Hendrick at the
conference hastily summoned at Albany to prepare for defense on the eve
of war. "Instead you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from
it. You have no fortifications, no, not even in this city. The French
are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women,
bare and open, without fortifications." Not one representative of seven
colonies had authority to reassure him. Sir William Johnson did, indeed,
negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Iroquois and the western
Indians; and the Virginia assembly, yielding at last to Governor
Dinwiddie's insistent demands, appropriated some money for maintaining
the wooden fort, well named Fort Necessity, which Colonel Washington had
built on the Ohio. But it was too late. The French built a better fort
at Duquesne; and they had scarcely defeated the Virginia colonel and
destroyed his fort before the English traders were driven from the
Indian villages, and no English flag was to be seen west of the
mountains. It was the western tribes that brought Braddock's expedition
to a disastrous end. While the Quakers at Philadelphia denounced the
iniquity of war, these quondam allies of England ravaged the frontiers
of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern tribes that had gladly
come to Oswego to trade in 1754, assisted Montcalm to capture and
destroy it in 1756.

Reverses in America were but part of the multiplied disasters which
befell English arms at the opening of the Seven Years' War. At the close
of the year 1756, with Hanover threatened and Minorca taken, with the
Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon
the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless
before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that
ministers who employed organized corruption to buttress the throne, who
rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova
Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with
which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis
many plans were forthcoming, at Albany and in London, for colonial union
and imperial defense; plans doubtless excellent in themselves, but
impracticable under the circumstances. They were therefore laid aside
until the war should be over. A plan of attack, not of defense, was now
the prim