with him and served him; and it was his statesmanship and his use of English arms that had made England’s dominion complete and England’s colonies safe in America. [Illustration: A PAGE OF “POOR RICHARD’S” ALMANAC] [Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN A COLONIAL DRAWING ROOM] English fleets and armies had not been sent to America, however, and equipped for warfare there, sustained in war season and out of it, without enormous expense; and that expense, which had set the colonies free to live without dread of danger or of confinement at any border, England had borne. It had been part of Mr. Franklin’s plan of union, proposed at Albany, that the congress of the colonies should sustain the armies used in their defence and pay for them by taxes levied in America; but that plan had been rejected, and this war for the ousting of the French had been fought at England’s cost,—much as the colonies had given of their own blood, and of their own substance for the equipment of their provincial levies, and much as they had suffered in all the obscure and painful fighting to protect their frontiers against the redskins, far away from set fields of battle. They had done more, indeed, than pay the costs which inevitably fell to them. They had “raised, paid, and clothed twenty-five thousand men,—a number,” if Mr. Franklin was right, “equal to those sent from Great Britain and far beyond their proportion. They went deeply in debt in doing this; and all their estates and taxes are mortgaged for many years to come in discharging that debt.” Parliament had itself acknowledged their loyal liberality and self-sacrifice, and had even voted them £200,000 a year for five years, when the war was over, by way of just reimbursement. But, though they had made sacrifices, they had, of course, not shared with the royal treasury the chief outlays of the war. Colonial governors, viewing affairs as representatives of the government at home, had again and again urged the ministers in London to tax the colonies, by act of Parliament, for means to pay for frontier forts, armies of defence, and all the business of imperial administration in America. But the ministers had hitherto known something of the temper of the colonists in such matters and had been too wise to attempt anything of the kind. Sir George Keith, who had been governor of Pennsylvania, had suggested to Sir Robert Walpole that he should raise revenue in the colonies; but that shrewd politician and man of affairs had flatly declined. “What,” he exclaimed, “I have old England against me, and do you think I will have New England likewise?” Chatham had held the same tone. What English armies did in America was part of England’s struggle for empire, for a leading station in power and riches in the world, and England should pay for it. The desire of the colonies to control their own direct taxes should be respected. English statesmen, so far, had seen the matter very much as observant Colonel Spotswood had