A new war was at hand, a war known to our childhood as the old French war, and the last waged by France and England for the dominion of North America. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had left the door wide open for new claims, and these soon led to a new war. Here again Rhode Island displayed great energy, sending Stephen Hopkins and Martin Howard, Jr., to represent her as Commissioners at the Albany Congress of 1754, in which Franklin brought forward his plan for developing by union the resources of the colonies, she took promptly the steps necessary for her own defence and complied cheerfully with the requisitions of the English commanders. In this as in former wars she sent out her privateers to harass the enemy's commerce. But her part in the contest was a limited one. Her troops went as contingents not as armies. She had no generals to give their names to great victories, and when peace returned her soldiers and sailors returned cheerfully to the duties and avocations of common life. The annexation of the eastern towns in 1757 marks an important period in the history of Rhode Island. With two unfriendly neighbors on each side she had been compelled to contend inch by inch for her territory. All the obstacles which impede development had accumulated in her path. All the dangers which menace the existence of feeble colonies had beset her. She had faced them all, she had overcome them all. A great principle lay at the root of her civilization, and humanity itself was inseparably connected with her success. From the annexation of the eastern towns in 1757 to the peace of Paris in 1763, all the leading events were more or less connected with the war. Privateering took the place of commerce. Taxes were levied to build and arm forts and raise and equip soldiers, not to erect churches and court houses and libraries and schools. The war was lingering but decisive. It gave England one brilliant victory and one illustrious name--the Heights of Abraham, and Wolf--to the colonies the lesson so valuable a few years later that English troops might be driven where colonists held their ground, and the name of Washington. Recorded in European history as the seven years war, for the colonies it was a war of nine years, hostilities having begun two years before war was declared. Nowhere is man's place in history more distinctly marked than in this war, which till the right man came was a succession of blunders and defeats. With William Pitt came victory. While the war was still confined to the colonies a large number of French residents had been thrown into jail as prisoners of war. What was their legal position? The question was brought before the Assembly by a petition for release, which was so far granted as to authorize their transportation to some neutral port, and so far rejected as to still subject them to the laws of war.