AMBITIOUS SCHEMES OF THE FRENCH.

While the British ministry depended upon the success of the conferences between the commissaries of the two crowns at Paris, the French were actually employed in executing their plans of encroachment upon the British colonies of North America. Their scheme was to engross the whole fur trade of that continent; and they had already made great progress in extending a chain of forts, connecting their settlements on the river Mississippi with their possessions in Canada, along the great lakes of Erie and Ontario, which last issues into the river St. Lawrence. By these means they hoped to exclude the English from all communication and traffic with the Indian nations, even those that lay contiguous to the British settlements, and confine them within a line of their drawing, beyond which they should neither extend their trade nor plantations. Their commercial spirit did not keep pace with the gigantic strides of their ambition; they could not supply all those Indians with the necessaries they wanted, so that many of the natives had recourse to the English settlements; and this commerce produced a connexion, in consequence of which the British adventurers ventured to travel with merchandise as far as the banks of the river Ohio, that runs into the Mississippi, a great way on the other side of the Apalachian mountains, beyond which none of our colonists had ever attempted to penetrate. The tract of country lying along the Ohio is so fertile, pleasant, and inviting, and the Indians, called Twightees, who inhabit those delightful plains, were so well disposed towards a close alliance with the English, that, as far back as the year one thousand seven hundred and sixteen, Mr. Spotswood, governor of Virginia, proposed a plan for erecting a company to settle such lands upon this river as should be ceded to them by treaty with the natives; but the design was at that time frustrated, partly by the indolence and timidity of the British ministry, who were afraid of giving umbrage to the French, and partly by the jealousies and divisions subsisting between the different colonies of Great Britain. The very same circumstances encouraged the French to proceed in their project of invasion. At length they penetrated from the banks of the river St. Lawrence, across lake Champlain, and upon the territory of New York, built with impunity, and indeed without opposition, the fort of Crown Point, the most insolent and dangerous encroachment that they had hitherto carried into execution.