ying his dislike. He could dismiss his minister without ceremony
and without question. Nowadays a minister depends for his power and
tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a
sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing
anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of
Commons. But when George the Third was king the only check upon the
royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of
finding another to take his place. This was the check George now met.
He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville. He turned to
Cumberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable
him to get rid of Grenville. Cumberland tried and Cumberland failed.
Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have
completely overmastered him. He was almost entirely under the
influence of Temple. Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to
Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that
detestation. Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse. Cumberland came back to
the King to tell of his failure. There was nothing to be done.
Grenville had to be kept on. If the enforced association {74} did not
make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted
under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that
the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their
stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common
obstacle. Such a case was then in existence.

[Sidenote: 1765--The American colonies]

Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was
represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow
strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American
continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the
British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two
centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those
colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting
them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European
power after European power. They were a source of wealth, a source of
honor, and a source of strength to England. They were cheaply bought
with the brave lives that had been given for them. It is hard to
realize that any sovereign, that any statesman could fail to see how
precious a possession they were, or how unwise any course of