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Thus, despite the fact that by the time of the Revolution the "back-country" farmers were far more than half of the total population, they could do but little to achieve their ends in most of the colonial legislatures. There was no legal way of defeating minority control and the occasion might never have arisen if the planter and merchant aristocracies had invariably ruled in the public interest. But, safe behind a barrier of farmers and frontiersmen, they were slow to vote money for frontier defense against the Indians. Merchants interested in the fur trade were rather more concerned with protection of the Indian than of the frontiersman. As dominating figures in colonial legislatures, planters and merchants had enormous advantages in the business of land speculation which engrossed so many Americans in the eighteenth century. They grabbed land everywhere, calmly indifferent to fraud and corruption as a method of acquisition, and then demanded strict legality in payments from the settlers to whom they sold it. Seated as they were near the coast and waterways, most of the planters and merchants were slow to vote the roads and bridges so needed by backcountry farmers to get their crops to market. If professional writers help me essay, I expect custom assignment