Finance, swinging from stringency to inflation of the currency, was an ever-present problem in the colony during the French and Indian Wars. In the mid-eighteenth century, a land bank was proposed in the hope of using land as the basis for credit in a country where gold and silver were so lacking, with a result disastrous to many farmers on the Cape. In 1748 paper was called in and the “piece of eight,” or Spanish dollar, made the standard; but again the easy issue of paper was too great a temptation, again there was depreciation and instability, again the struggle back to a standard dollar. In 1749, after “King George’s War,” England liquidated the war debt of the Province by paying into the treasury at Boston a fund of some one hundred and eighty thousand pounds that were carted through the streets in seventeen truckloads of silver and ten of copper. Henceforth it was provided that all debts should be paid in coined silver, which is said to originate the term “lawful money.” II All these fifty years since the accession of William and Mary had been complicated by more or less participation in the foreign wars of the mother country; and the hereditary hatred of France and England lived on, with new occasions, in their colonies. Those of France had been planted and fostered by the crown; those of England largely by her rebels; Catholic France never could sympathize with the English heretics; and now that the power of Spain was broken, French and English traders and fishermen were the chief rivals for domination of the new countries and the seas, east and west, north and south, the world over. In 1689 the principle of colonial neutrality had been proposed by France and rejected, to her considerable subsequent cost, by England. And at the beginning of “King William’s War,” so-called, Massachusetts, commanded by the Governor, Sir William Phips, set forth on her adventure for the reduction of Port Royal and Quebec. Port Royal fell, its loot paying for the expedition, but was retaken by the French. France’s reply was an invasion of the border, assisted by her Indian allies; and now and thereafter throughout the French wars there was great apprehension, particularly by Cape Cod in its defenceless state, of French sea-raids on the New England coast. After the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, France claimed all the fisheries east of the Kennebec and all English boats there found were forfeit by order of the king—fruitful cause, one may suppose, for fresh quarrels. And no later than 1702 “Queen Anne’s War” revived the Indian raids, and the sacking of Deerfield roused the colonies to a holy war. On the Continent, meantime, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” and in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the French wars for thirty-three years’ breathing space; in the new world France lost forever Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay Territory.