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 394 territory, and heighten the glory of the Grand Monarch. For, I am told that in Canada, to have made the tour of the Lakes, and Ohio and Mississippi, is reckoned an essential qualification, almost the sine quá non to recommend young gentlemen to any important posts, civil or military, under the government, the advantages of which they are now reaping. And happy would it have been for us if a tour of the same nature had been an especial qualification for recommending gentlemen to seats in the Supreme Court, while those regions were equally accessible to us and to them. But now, these gentlemen living in the lower parts of the country, within a day's ride of Williamsburg, except one, and none of them knowing any thing of the back country, our frontiers, from this very reason, have been left thus naked and exposed. Great are my hopes, that as the people both of Great Britain and the Colonies seem now at length to be highly sensible of the mischiefs of our past lethargy and supineness, we at last shall rouse, and let those bold intruders know they are not thus insolently to encroach on the demesne of the British Crown with impunity, nor peaceably allowed to wrest from us a country, the present intrinsic value of which, together with such future and contingent advantages as are in prospect, besides others out of view, of which yet the womb of time may be productive, almost exceed the power of numbers to calculate. Were I only to enumerate in a concise manner such of the important benefits only of the country watered by the Ohio, which is but one branch of the Mississippi, as occur even to myself, who have not leisure to attend to matters of that sort, my letter would swell to an enormous size. Your own imagination, therefore, shall be permitted at leisure to range this ample field which I have here been endeavoring to