As might be expected, this bill was not allowed even a second reading, but a motion was at once passed “that it was the great essential and undoubted right of the representatives of the people of this colony to begin all bills from raising and disbursing of money,” and that the bill of the Council should be rejected. In an address to the governor it was intimated that the one thousand pounds recently voted for entertaining the Indians at the council at Albany had been used for other purposes than the public good. After four days of foolish resistance, the governor, knowing he was unable to make headway when so clearly in the wrong, passed all the bills. Then, gratifying a personal spite at the expense of the public, he dissolved the Assembly. All this was what those who think the story of American liberty was fought out chiefly in New England would call the “teapot-tempest politics of the New York Assembly.” Yet here was the great principle upon which republican government is founded, and for which Holland revolted against Spain, and the American colonies against England; “our great example,” as Franklin declared, being the Dutch republic. The Dutch had, centuries before, beyond the dikes of Holland, developed and fought for the doctrine of “no taxation without consent;” and Clinton, Colden, and their coadjutors were clearly in the wrong. Further, the representatives were right in hinting that Clinton and his flatterers were too anxious to improve their own fortunes, and to make the people pay for their needless junketings enjoyed in the name of public service. Those who read the local history of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys know how burdensome to the people was the silly and costly pageantry of royal governors on their travels. Johnson, probably with his eyes needfully opened, on reaching his home after the dissolution of the Assembly, found the outlook for the ultimate occupation of the mid-continent by the English rather gloomy. The French held the frontier of New York on its three strategic lines,—Crown Point, La Presentation, and Niagara. They were now planning to plant a mission, which should mean a fort and a church, at Onondaga Lake, near which had perhaps been—if we so interpret the inscription on the Pompey stone—a Spanish settlement once destroyed by the Senecas. Even if the stone, inscribed with the symbols and chronology of Christendom, were that of a captive, it is a mournful but interesting relic.