Safety-valves having thus been opened through the ink-bottles, the war of words ceased, and both governor and legislators proceeded to diligence in business. In expectation that Massachusetts and Connecticut would bear their quota of expense, the governor was requested, October 15, to carry out his plan of sending gunsmiths and other mechanics to live among and assist the tribes of the Confederacy westward of the Mohawks. Four days after, however, news came from England ordering the disbanding of all the levies for the expedition to Canada. This was disheartening alike to the governors and the people of the colonies; but some compromise measures were amicably agreed upon between Clinton and the Assembly. Peace, in New York City at least, seemed almost at hand, when Clinton again attempted folly in trying to muzzle the press. The Assembly had ordered Parker, the public printer, to publish the address and remonstrance of the Assembly, in which they asserted the rights of the people. The governor commanded him to desist. Parker stood by the people and their Assembly, as against the king and his foolish governor. After Cosby’s ignominious failure to restrain the liberty of the press by imprisoning Zenger, this act of Clinton’s seemed like that of a madman or a man who had no memory. The Assembly ordered Parker to print their manifests, and to furnish each member with two copies, “that their constituents might know it was their firm resolution to preserve the liberty of the press.” In a word, all this wrangle between colonial governor and Assembly was really the cause of popular liberty against monarchy, of ordered freedom under law against despotism. It was part of the chequered story of liberty, in which the people of New York were in no whit behind those of any of the colonies, but rather led them. Clinton, by his blunders, and Colden, by his toryism, helped grandly forward the American revolution, while the names of Parker and Zenger belong with those of the promoters of order and freedom. When on the 25th day of November, 1747,—significant date, for on that day, only thirty-six years later, King George’s troops and mercenaries evacuated that very city of New York, in which Clinton had illustrated the folly of monarchy,—after addressing, or rather berating, the people’s representatives, he concluded his address with the significant words:— “Your continued grasping for power, with an evident tendency to the weakening of the dependency of the province on Great Britain, accompanied by such notorious and public disrespect to the character of your governor, and contempt of the king’s authority intrusted with him, cannot longer be hid from your superiors, but must come under their observation, and is of most dangerous example to your neighbours.”