her own borders. It is interesting to notice the early flashes of lurking revolutionary fire in the Colonies when the mother-country attempted to wield them to serve her own politic schemes. Braddock was perhaps one of the first Englishmen to suggest the taxation of America and, within a year, Walpole wrote concerning instructions sent to a New York Governor, that they "seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal than for a free rich British Settlement, and in such opulence and of such haughtiness, that suspicion had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off their dependence on their mother country."[1] It would have been well for the provinces if they had postponed for a moment their struggle against English methods, and planned as earnestly for the success of English arms as they did when defeat opened the floodgates of murder and pillage all along their wide frontiers. But it is not possible to more than mention here the struggles
- ↑ Walpole's Memoirs of George II, vol. i., p. 397; Sargent's History of Braddock's Expedition, p. 153, note.
