elming
majorities Parliament accordingly passed the coercive acts, closing
Boston Harbor to commerce until the town made compensation to the East
India Company, remodeling the Massachusetts charter in such a manner as
to give to the Crown more effective control of the executive and
administrative functions of government, making provision for quartering
troops upon the inhabitants, and providing for the trial in England of
persons indicted for capital offenses committed while aiding the
magistrates to suppress tumults or insurrection.

Drastic as these measures were, they were regarded in England as the
necessary last resort, unless the Government, hitherto so indulgent and
long-suffering, was prepared to ignore the most flagrant flouting of its
laws and to renounce all effective control of the colonies. In the
colonies, on the other hand, they were generally thought, even by
conservative patriots, to be clear evidence of a bold and unblushing
design, unapproved by the majority of Englishmen, no doubt, but harbored
in secret for many years by the king's hireling ministers, to enslave
America as a preliminary step in the destruction of English liberties.
Firm in this belief, the colonists elected their deputies to the First
Continental Congress, which was called to meet at Philadelphia on the
1st of September, 1774, in order to unite upon the most effective
measures for defending their common rights.

IV

The causes which had brought the two countries to this pass lie deeper
than the hostile designs of ministers, or the ambition of colonial
agitators bent on revolution. It has been said that the Revolution was
the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. A misunderstanding it
was, sure enough, in one sense; but if by misunderstanding is meant lack
of information there is more truth in the famous epigram which has it
that Grenville lost the colonies because he read the American
dispatches, which none of his predecessors had done. In the decade
before the Declaration of Independence every exchange of ideas drove the
two countries farther apart, and personal contact alienated more often
than it reconciled the two peoples. It was the years of actual residence
in England that cooled Franklin's love for the mother country. "Had I
never been in the American colonies," he writes in 1772, "but was to
form my judgement of civil society from what I have lately seen, I
should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civili