y. City
government gives the individual a chance to bury himself in the mass,
and to avoid his duties; further, our cities are now many, and very
large, while we are notoriously patient under misrule. In 1760, on the
other hand, few towns had as yet adopted city government. Boston was the
largest town, and its population was little more than fifteen thousand.
So well did its enemies understand one reason for its truculence, that
they even considered means to force upon the town a city charter. The
question came, however, to no definite proposition. The town therefore
proceeded with its open discussion of all public questions, with its
right of free speech in town meetings extended even to strangers, and
with its _viva voce_ vote letting each man know where his neighbor
stood. "The town" was an entity of which each man felt himself a part.
As a whole, its self-consciousness was like that of an individual: it
could feel a trespass on its privileges as quickly as could the
haughtiest monarch of the old world. And all New England was filled with
towns whose feelings, on all essential points, were one and the same.

Against the town-meetings of America stood George III, as determined to
assert his prerogatives as was any member of the house of Stuart. Still
comparatively young, he had not yet learned that there are limitations
of power, even to a king. And it was to the misfortune of his empire
that there were few in England to teach him.

For the old Puritan middle class of the Stuart days was gone. Its fibre
had softened; the class itself had disappeared in the easier-going
masses of a more prosperous day. For seventy-five years England had had
no internal dissensions, and her foreign wars had added to her wealth
and contentment. To her well-wishers it seemed as if the people had
given itself to sloth and indulgence. "I am satisfied," wrote Burke,
"that, within a few years, there has been a great change in the national
character. We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery
people which we have been formerly, and which we have been a very short
time ago."[8] England was the country of Tom Jones, hearty and healthy,
but animated by no high principles and keyed to no noble actions. It
needed the danger of the Napoleonic wars to bring out once more the
sturdy manliness of the nation. Through all the earlier reign of George
III there was, to be sure, a remainder of the old high-minded spirit.
Chatham and Rockingh