Clinton was, no doubt, very glad to have, in place of a Livingstone, one who was so loyally devoted to the Crown, and so good a personal friend as Johnson near him, Johnson, however, was not sworn in and seated until 1751. The state of affairs was growing worse and worse, and Clinton the foolish had attempted to stay the tide of democracy by having no Assembly called for two years. When, however, it met on Sept. 4, 1750, Johnson’s bills for six hundred and eighty-six pounds, for provisions sent to Oswego, were cheerfully paid; but the vote was so made that the governor’s claims were, as he thought, invaded. However, for good reasons, and fearing the loss of trade, he submitted. Could Johnson’s invaluable services have been acknowledged without also making recognition of Clinton’s pretensions, the Assembly would have been more liberal. The remarks and strictures of the biographer and eulogist of Johnson about the Dutch traders of Albany, and “the love of gain so characteristic of that nation” (_sic_) seem strange when the same love of gain was, and is, equally characteristic of Englishman, Yankee, Scotsman, Huguenot, and Quaker. No one will justify the members of the New York Colonial Assembly in all their acts, especially those which were clearly contemptible; but we cannot see that Johnson, Clinton, or the English loved either lucre or liquor any less than the Albany Dutchmen. Indeed, it was the well-founded suspicion that Clinton was using his office largely to recoup his broken fortunes that made the representatives resist him at every point. Johnson, however, finding that the Assembly and the governor could never be reconciled, and that his first bill of two thousand pounds would be likely, under existing circumstances, to remain unpaid, resigned his office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To his Iroquois friends he announced this step by sending wampum belts to all the chief fortified towns of the Confederacy. Neither war nor peace had settled the question of the boundary lines between the French and English possessions in America. The French claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys by right of prior discovery by La Salle and others. The English based their ownership on occupation by the Iroquois or their vassals, and because the Five Nations were allies of Great Britain. Both parties now began anew to occupy the land. The race was westward through the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. The starting-points were from tidewater Virginia and from Montreal. Not on parallel lines, but toward the apex of a triangle, and straight toward collision, the movement began. The Ohio Company was formed with a grant of six hundred thousand acres by the English Government, chiefly to speculators in Virginia. George Washington was one of the first to be smitten with the fever of speculation, and to the end of his days he made investments in the Western lands as eagerly as many do now in Western farm mortgages.