her why it was sending troops to America and
each gave the assurance of benevolent designs. But in the spring of 1755
a British fleet under Admiral Boscawen put to sea with instructions to
capture any French vessels bound for North America. At the same time the
two armies were on the way across the Atlantic. Dieskau went to Canada,
Braddock to Virginia, each instructed to attack the other side, while
in the meantime ambassadors at the two courts gave bland assurances that
their only thought was to preserve peace.

The English colonists showed a political blindness that amounted to
imbecility. Albany was the central point from which the dangers on all
sides might best be surveyed. Here came together in the summer of 1754
delegates from seven of the colonies to consider the common peril. The
French were busy in winning, as they did, the support of the many Indian
tribes of the West; and the old allies of the English, the Iroquois,
were nervous for their own safety. The delegates to Albany, tied and
bound by instructions from their Assemblies, had to listen to plain
words from the savages. The one Englishman who, in dealing with the
Indians, had tact and skill equal to that of Frontenac of old, was
an Irishman, Sir William Johnson. To him the Iroquois made indignant
protests that the English were as ready as the French to rob them of
their lands. If we find a bear in a tree, they said, some one will
spring up to claim that the tree belongs to him and keep us from
shooting the bear. The French, they added, are at least men who are
prepared to fight; you weak and un-prepared English are like women
and any day the French may turn you out. Benjamin Franklin told the
delegates that they must unite to meet a common enemy. Unite, however,
they would not. No one of them would surrender to a central body
any authority through which the power of the King over them might be
increased. The Congress--the word is full of omen for the future--failed
to bring about the much-needed union.

In February, 1755, Braddock arrived in Virginia with his army, and early
in May he was on his march across the mountains with regulars, militia,
and Indians, to the number of nearly fifteen hundred men, to attack Fort
Duquesne and to rid the Ohio Valley of the French. He knew little of
forest warfare with its use of Indian scouts, its ambushes, its fighting
from the cover of trees. On the 9th of July, on the Monongahela River,
near Fort Duquesne, in a s