The Colonies were still quite asleep to their danger; the year before, Governor Dinwiddie had been at his wits' end to raise in Virginia a few score men for Fry and Washington, and had at last succeeded by dint of drafts and offers of bounty in western lands. Pennsylvania was hopelessly embroiled in the then unconstitutional question of equal taxation of proprietary estates. The New York assembly was, and not without reason, clannish in giving men and money for use only within her own borders. It is interesting to notice the early flashes of lurking revolutionary fire in the Colonies when the mother-country attempted to wield them to serve her own politic schemes. Braddock was perhaps one of the first Englishmen to suggest the taxation of America and, within a year, Walpole wrote concerning instructions sent to a New York Governor, that they "seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal than for a free rich British Settlement, and in such opulence and of such haughtiness, that suspicion had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off their dependence on their mother country."[11] It would have been well for the provinces if they had postponed for a moment their struggle against English methods, and planned as earnestly for the success of English arms as they did when defeat opened the floodgates of murder and pillage all along their wide frontiers. But it is not possible to more than mention here the struggles between the short-sighted assemblies and the short-sighted royal governors. The practical result, so far as Braddock was concerned, was the ignoring, for the greater part, of all the instructions sent from London. This meant that Braddock was abandoned to the fate of carrying out orders wretchedly planned under the most trying circumstances conceivable. Instead of having everything prepared for him, he found almost nothing prepared, and on what had been done he found he could place no dependence. Little wonder the doomed man has been remembered as a "brute" in America! To have shouldered the blame for the lethargy of the Colonies, for the jealousy of their governors, and for the wretchedness of the orders given Braddock, would have made any man brutish in word and action. Pennsylvanians have often accused Washington of speaking like a "brute" when, no doubt in anger, he exclaimed that the officials of that Province should have been flogged for their indifference; they were, God knows,--but by the Indians after Braddock's defeat.