seen it thirty odd years ago. If the ministers should direct moneys to be paid by act of Parliament, he said, “they would find it no easy matter to put such an act into execution”; and he deemed it “against the right of Englishmen,” besides, “to be taxed, but by their representatives,”—new colonist though he was, and only the other day a governor of the crown in Virginia, the oldest and most loyal of the colonies. [Illustration: MRS. BENEDICT ARNOLD AND CHILD] It was now more than forty years since Colonel Spotswood, in the days of his governorship, had ridden to the far summit of the Alleghanies and looked down their western slopes towards the regions where England and France were to meet. Since that day he had served the crown very quietly as postmaster general for the colonies. At last he had died (1740) when on the eve of sailing with Virginian troops for Cartagena, about to return at the very end of his days to his old calling of arms. He had lived thirty years in Virginia, all told, and spoke out of abundant knowledge when he expressed a judgment as to what the ministers would find it hard to do in the colonies. He knew, as every man did who had had anything to do with the service of the crown in America, how stubbornly the colonists had resisted every attempt to unite their governments under a single governor or any single system, and how determined they had been to keep their governments in their own hands, notwithstanding they must have seen, as everybody else saw, the manifest advantage of union and a common organization in the face of England’s rivals in America, north and south. The King’s object in seeking to consolidate the more northern colonies under Sir Edmund Andros, whom New England had so hated, was not to attack their liberties, but “to weld them into one strongly governed state,” such as should be able to present a firm front to the encroachments of the French,—a statesmanlike object, which no man who wished to serve the interests of English empire could reasonably criticise. But the colonists had not cared to regard their little commonwealths as pieces of an empire. They regarded them simply as their own homes and seats of self-government; and they feared to have them swallowed up in any scheme of consolidation, whatever its object. The French war, consequently, had been fought by the government in England, and not by any government in America. [Illustration: FRANKLIN’S OLD BOOK-SHOP, NEXT TO CHRIST’S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA]