action
must be which could tend in any way to lessen their affection or to
alienate their support. Yet such a sovereign was upon the throne and
such a minister was by his side.

Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that
his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war
is." Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies
represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and
appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times
contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between
the old country and the new. To the bulk of the British people America
was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for
the most part with black men and red men, and dimly associated with
sugar-planting and the tobacco trade. Its distance alone made it seem
sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by
business or {75} by politics into association with its inhabitants.
The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for
fortitude and triple brass. The man was indeed lucky who could make
the passage from shore to shore in six weeks of stormy sea, and the
journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same
conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of
the "Mayflower." The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves
as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan.
Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too
far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of
the bulk of the English people. Of the minority who did possess
anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the
majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the
reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown.
These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which
to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins
or the myths of the Six Nations.

If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little
more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New
England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober,
frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice,
and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great
poverty nor great wealth was common among those