Benjamin Franklin: “Surely this is nothing less than the most egregious folly and madness.”

Few of their Children in the Country learn English . . . The Signs in our Streets have Inscriptions in both Languages, and in some places only [their language] . . . In short, unless the Stream of their Importation could be turned…

Our legal method of compulsion is by imprisonment: the Indians cannot and will not imprison one another; and if we attempt to imprison them, I apprehend it would be generally disliked by the nations, and occasion breaches.

We are obliged to carry a great part of our produce directly to Britain; and where the duties laid upon it lessen its price to the planter, or it sells for less than it would in foreign markets, the difference is a tax paid to Britain.

It is upon this fact I found the propriety of the measure of settling a barrier colony in those parts of our frontiers, which are not the immediate residence or hunting-grounds of our Indians.