Clinton, upon his arrival at New York, had found, as Clarke predicted, the province “in great tranquillity and in a flourishing condition, able to support the government in an ample and honorable manner.” He perhaps would have had no difficulty with the general assembly about money grants, if he had been less distrustful of Clarke and more willing to acknowledge the rights of the people in such matters. His first measures of dissolving the old assembly, calling a new one, and, perhaps for the first time in America, introducing a kind of civil service reform by continuing in place all officers who had been appointed by his predecessors, were received with great satisfaction throughout the province, but they failed to loosen the strings of the public purse, while the new assembly sought other measures to declare their independence. Clarke’s advice, given before Clinton’s arrival, that henceforth the assembly should allow the government a revenue for a term of years, was not acted upon; but instead they voted the usual appropriations for one year only. In voting salaries for officers, they did not recognize the incumbents by name, and the council pronounced this a device of the assembly to usurp the appointing power, and to change the stipends of the officers at any time. Walpole had meanwhile turned over the government in England to his friend Pelham, a family connection of Governor Clinton. Macaulay describes Pelham as a man with an understanding like that of Walpole, “on a somewhat smaller scale.” During Pelham’s administration, a bill was considered in the House of Commons in 1744, news of which, upon reaching the colonies, did not fail to arouse their indignation. It forbade the American colonies to issue bills of credit or paper money. As these colonies had but little trade, and had to draw upon Europe for the tools and necessaries of life in the newly opened wilderness, the small amount of coin which they received from the West Indies and the Spanish main in exchange for bread-stuffs and lumber, their only articles of exportation, went across the ocean in part payment of their debts, leaving no “instrument of association,” no circulating medium, in their hands. To replace the coin, they had to have recourse to the issue of paper money, without which all intercolonial and internal trade would have been impossible. The parliamentary intention of depriving the colonies of these means of exchange led the New York assembly to declare that the bill was contrary to the constitution of Great Britain, inconsistent with the liberties and privileges of Englishmen, and subjected the British colonies in America to the absolute will of the crown and its officers.