Gage, a second Pharaoh; though it must be admitted that
even then the King was "the tyrant of Great Britain." After Bunker Hill
spasmodic declarations of independence were made here and there by local
bodies. When Congress organized an army, invaded Canada, and besieged
Boston, it was hard to protest loyalty to a King whose forces were
those of an enemy. Moreover independence would, in the eyes at least of
foreign governments, give the colonies the rights of belligerents and
enable them to claim for their fighting forces the treatment due to a
regular army and the exchange of prisoners with the British. They could,
too, make alliances with other nations. Some clamored for independence
for a reason more sinister--that they might punish those who held to the
King and seize their property. There were thirteen colonies in arms
and each of them had to form some kind of government which would work
without a king as part of its mechanism. One by one such governments
were formed. King George, as we have seen, helped the colonies to make
up their minds. They were in no mood to be called erring children who
must implore undeserved mercy and not force a loving parent to take
unwilling vengeance. "Our plantations" and "our subjects in the
colonies" would simply not learn obedience. If George III would not
reply to their petitions until they laid down their arms, they could
manage to get on without a king. If England, as Horace Walpole admitted,
would not take them seriously and speakers in Parliament called them
obscure ruffians and cowards, so much the worse for England.

It was an Englishman, Thomas Paine, who fanned the fire into
unquenchable flames. He had recently been dismissed from a post in
the excise in England and was at this time earning in Philadelphia a
precarious living by his pen. Paine said it was the interest of America
to break the tie with Europe. Was a whole continent in America to be
governed by an island a thousand leagues away? Of what advantage was
it to remain connected with Great Britain? It was said that a united
British Empire could defy the world, but why should America defy the
world? "Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation."
Interested men, weak men, prejudiced men, moderate men who do not really
know Europe, may urge reconciliation, but nature is against it. Paine
broke loose in that denunciation of kings with which ever since the
world has been familiar. The wretched Briton, said