am, Burke, Barre, and others, spoke in public and
private for the rights of the colonists, to whom their encouragement
gave strength. But the greater part of the English people was so
indifferent to the moral and political significance of the quarrel that
the king was practically able to do as he pleased.

He proceeded on the assumption that every man had his price. The
assumption was unhappily too correct, for he was able to gather round
him, in Parliament or the civil service, his own party, the "King's
Friends," who served him for the profit that they got. No tale of modern
corruption can surpass the record of their plundering of a nation. With
this goes a story of gambling, drinking, and general loose living which,
while the attention is concentrated on it, rouses the belief that the
nation was wholly degenerate, until the recollection of the remnant,
Chatham and the party of the Earl of Rockingham, gives hope of the
salvation of the country.

At any rate, for more than fifteen years of his reign the king was in
the ascendant. There was no party to depose him, scarcely one strong
enough to curb him, even at times of popular indignation. He was,
therefore, as no other king had been before him, able to force the issue
upon the colonies, in spite of the protests of the few friends of
liberty. In complete ignorance of the strength of the colonists, both in
resources and in purpose, he proceeded to insist upon his rights. When
it is remembered that those rights, according to his interpretation of
them, were to tax without representation, to limit trade and
manufactures, and to interfere at will in the management of colonial
affairs, it will be seen that he was playing with fire.

The danger will appear the greater if it is considered that the
population of the colonies had not progressed, like that of England, to
days of easy tolerance. The Americans, and especially the New
Englanders, were of the same stuff as those who had beheaded Charles I,
and driven James II from his kingdom. They had among their military
officers plenty of such men as Pomeroy, who, destined to fight at Bunker
Hill, wrote from the siege of Louisburg: "It looks as if our campaign
would last long; but I am willing to stay till God's time comes to
deliver the city into our hands."[9] Many besides himself wrote, and
even spoke, in Biblical language. There were still heard, in New
England, the echoes of the "Great Awakening"; the preaching of
Whitefi