by the Postmaster
General in England.

The post-office department had scarcely been self-supporting. It had
never paid anything to the crown. The salary offered to the two
postmasters was three thousand dollars a year each, if they could save
that sum from the profits of the office. Franklin writes,

"To do this a variety of improvements was necessary. Some of
these were inevitably, at first, expensive; so that in the
first four years, the office became above nine hundred
pounds in debt to us. But it soon after began to repay us.
And before I was displaced by a freak of the ministers, of
which I shall hereafter speak, we had brought it to yield
three times as much clear revenue to the crown as the
post-office of Ireland. Since that imprudent transaction,
they have received from it not one farthing."

Again there were menaces of war, insane and demoniac, to fill the
world with tears and woe. As we read the record of these horrid
outrages which through all the centuries have desolated this globe, it
would seem that there must be a vein of insanity as well as of
depravity, in the heart of fallen man. England and France were again
marshaling their armies, and accumulating their fleets, for the
terrible conflict.

It was certain that France, in Canada, and England, in her colonies,
could not live in peace here, while the volcanic throes of war were
shaking the island of Great Britain, and the Continent of Europe.

In the heart of New York, then almost an unbroken wilderness, there
were six exceedingly fierce and war-like tribes called the Six
Nations. Like the wolves they delighted in war. The greatness of a man
depended on the number of scalps with which he could fringe his dress.
These savage warriors were ready and eager to engage as the allies of
those who would pay them the highest price. Mercy was an attribute of
which they knew not even the name.

It was not doubted that France would immediately send her emissaries
from Canada to enlist these savages on her side. Awful would be the
woes with which these demoniac men could sweep our defenceless
frontiers; with the tomahawk and the scalping knife, exterminating
families, burning villages, and loading their pack-horses with
plunder. To forestall the French, and to turn these woes from our own
frontier to the humble homes of the Canadian emigrants, the English
government appointed a commissioner to visit the chiefs of