things right.  This commission was a very strong one.  Benjamin Franklin was the chairman.  Samuel Chase of Maryland and Charles Carroll of Carrollton were the other members.  Carroll’s brother, the future archbishop of Baltimore, accompanied them as a sort of ecclesiastical diplomatist.  Franklin’s prestige and the fact that he was to set up a ‘free’ printing-press in Montreal were to work wonders with the educated classes at once and with the uneducated masses later on.  Chase would appeal to all the reasonable ‘moderates.’  Carroll, a great landlord and the nearest approach yet made to an American millionaire, was expected to charm the Canadian noblesse; while the fact that he and his exceedingly diplomatic brother were devout Roman Catholics was thought to be by itself a powerful argument with the clergy.

When they reached St Johns towards the end of April the commissioners sent on a courier to announce their arrival and prepare for their proper reception in Montreal.  But the ferryman at Laprairie positively refused to accept Continental paper money at any price; and it was only when a ‘Friend of Liberty’ gave him a dollar in silver that he consented to cross the courier over the St Lawrence.  The same hitch occurred in Montreal, where the same Friend of Liberty had to pay in silver before the cab-drivers consented to accept a fare either from him or from the commissioners.  Even the name of Carroll of Carrollton was conjured with in vain.  The French Canadians remembered Bigot’s bad French paper.  Their worst suspicions were being confirmed about the equally bad American paper.  So they demanded nothing but hard cash—­argent dur.  However, the first great obstacle had been successfully overcome; and so, on the strength of five borrowed silver dollars, the accredited commissioners of the Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies made their state entry into what they still hoped to call the Fourteenth Colony.  But silver dollars were scarce; and on the 1st of May the crestfallen commissioners had to send the Congress a financial report which may best be summed up in a pithy phrase which soon became proverbial—­’Not worth a Continental.’

On the 10th of May they heard the bad news from Quebec and increased the panic among their Montreal sympathizers by hastily leaving the city lest they should be cut off by a British man-of-war.  Franklin foresaw the end and left for Philadelphia accompanied by the Reverend John Carroll, whose twelve days of disheartening experience with the leading French-Canadian clergy had convinced him that they were impervious to any arguments or blandishments emanating from the Continental Congress.  It was a sad disillusionment for the commissioners, who had expected to be settling the affairs of a fourteenth colony instead of being obliged to leave the city from which they were to have enlightened the people with a free press.  In their first angry ignorance they laid the whole blame on their