her all, on purpose to destroy her."

The words seemed prophetic, England's loss came through her gain. The
Indians, devoted to the French, refused to submit peacefully to the
change of rule. Pontiac, often regarded as the ablest statesman of his
fading race, gathered them into a widespread confederacy, and for years
held the English at bay in the region of the Great Lakes.[24] The
expenses involved both upon England and upon her American colonists by
this strife and by the French war itself were a constant source of
friction. England insisted that she had spent her substance in defence
of the colonists, and should be repaid by them. They on the other hand
asserted that she had fought for her own glory, and had been well repaid
by her vast increases of territory both in India and America; that they
had become impoverished, while she had now the richest trade in the
world, and stood upon the top-most pinnacle of national grandeur with
wealth pouring in to her from every quarter of the globe.

Neither side being able to convince the other by abstract argument,
England exerted her authority and passed the "Stamp Act," laying new
taxes on the colonists.[25] They responded with protests, argumentative,
eloquent, fiery, and defiant. They refused to trade with Great Britain,
and became self-supporting. Thus the obnoxious laws, instead of bringing
money to the mother country, caused her heavy losses. English merchants
joined the Americans in petitioning for the repeal of the offensive acts
of Parliament; and soon every tax was withdrawn except a tiny one on
tea, so small that the money involved was trifling. But it was not the
money, it was the principle involved, which had aroused the Americans;
and their resistance continued as vigorous as against the previous
really burdensome taxation. The tea which King George commanded should
be sent forcibly to the colonists, they refused to receive. In Boston it
was dumped into the harbor.[26]

The English Parliament drew back in amazement; its members found
themselves dealing, as one of them put it, with a nation of lawyers.
They were wrong; they had encountered a force far more potent, a nation
of freemen who had been permitted for a century and a half to rule
themselves, who had reached the fullest measure of self-reliance and
self-assertion. America had become earliest ripe for the Age of
Revolution toward which the European middle classes, more lately left to
themselves, were mor