ely discriminating between
the uses and the abuses of a colonial paper currency, Parliament passed
the act "to prevent paper bills of credit hereafter issued in any of his
Majesty's colonies, from being declared to be a legal tender in payment
of money, and to prevent the legal tender of such bills as are now
subsisting, from being prolonged beyond the periods limited for calling
in and sinking the same."

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Grenville had already turned to the problem
of defense, so inseparably connected with the question of Indian
relations and Western settlement. The English Government had long
recognized the necessity of securing the friendship of the Indians; and
to this end it had fostered the settlement of the interior. Indian
traders, employing methods none too scrupulous, had been encouraged to
ply their traffic beyond the mountains. Many thousands of acres of land
had been granted, to individuals and to companies of promoters, in the
belief that "nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous
designs of the French," or better enable the English "to cultivate a
friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the Indians
inhabiting those parts." It was a policy which all Americans could
understand. To those colonists who had fought with Washington to beat
back the tide of Indian massacre, to those who had witnessed the
destruction of Fort Duquesne, the conquest of Canada had no meaning
unless it opened the great West to free settlement. And during the
latter years of the war, thousands of families in all the old provinces
were prepared, as Franklin said, "to swarm," while many hundreds had
crossed the mountains and were already seated in the upper valleys of
the Ohio.

Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy
originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious
enough that if titles to land were granted, not only by the English
Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over
the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure
result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior
was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the
allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly
every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not
resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well
aware that the pretended friendship