It was a violent reaction for Shirley from the enthusiasm of the Louisbourg victory, thus to experience the fickleness of what he called the “mobbishness” of the people; and his trust in the town meeting and the assembly was not strengthened when the representatives reduced his allowance, on pretence of the burdens which the war had brought. Shirley intimated that the 200,000 population of the province and a capital with 20,000 inhabitants did not mark a people incompetent to pay their rulers equably; but his intimations went for little. The colony was not in very good humor. England, in making the treaty of Aix la Chapelle (October 7, 1748), had agreed to restore Louisbourg to the French, and leave the bounds as before the war. There were discordant opinions among the advisers of the government touching the real value of Louisbourg as a military post; but it was unfortunate that to redress the balance in Europe England had to relinquish the conquests of her colonists. It may not have been wholly without regard to the quelling of the New England pride, which might become dangerous,—since Sam. Adams was pluming his political rhetoric in the _Independent Advertiser_ at this time,—that it was thought best by that treaty to give to the province an intimation of the superior authority of the Crown.[298] The province was not without its own power of warning, for Hugh Orr, a young Scotchman, manufactured about this time at Bridgewater 500 stands of arms for the province of Massachusetts Bay; which are said to have been carried off by the British from Castle William when they evacuated Boston in March, 1776. They are supposed to have been the first made in America.[299]