rious folly was not confined to the colonial governor.
Lord Hillsborough was no less foolish and no less dangerous than
Bernard. Horace Walpole described Hillsborough as nothing more than a
pompous composition of ignorance and want of judgment. He certainly
was hopelessly ignorant of America, and he certainly showed a hopeless
want of judgment in his dealings with the Americans. Hillsborough
backed up Bernard in his blunders and his braggadocio with the light
heart that comes of an empty head. He backed up Bernard with a steady
zeal that would have been splendid if it could have been made to serve
any useful purpose. Where Bernard was bellicose and blustering,
Hillsborough blustered and was bellicose in his turn. It was
Hillsborough's honest, innate conviction that the American colonists
were a poor-spirited, feeble-hearted, and still more feeble-handed pack
of rascals, braggarts whom a firm front discomfited, natural bondsmen
to whom it was only necessary, as in the old classic story, to show the
whip to awe them into cringing submission. This theory found its
fittest formula a little later, when Hillsborough, speaking for the
Government he adorned, and {149} inspired by a more than usual afflatus
of folly, declared that "we can grant nothing to the Americans except
what they may ask with a halter round their necks." It is difficult to
believe that a reasonable minister, endowed with a sufficient degree of
human ability to push his way from office to office and from title to
title, could have known so little of the history of his own country and
the characteristics of his own countrymen as to think that any of
England's children were easily to be frightened into ignominious
supplication. But Hillsborough undoubtedly did think so, and he always
acted consistently in support of his strong conviction that the
independent colonists were nothing more than a mob of cowardly
malcontents. He acted on this conviction to such good purpose that his
name has earned its place of honor with that of Grenville, of
Townshend, and of Wedderburn, in the illustrious junta who were
successfully busy about the sorry business of converting a great empire
into a small one.

[Sidenote: 1766--The Mutiny Act]

After the Stamp Act had raised its crop of disturbance and disorder,
the Government extended to the colonies the measure called the Mutiny
Act, for the quartering of troops and providing them with necessaries.
The Legislature o