an equally stringent declaration."[367]
After stating that the Legislature of Pennsylvania, before its
adjournment, adopted rules for the volunteer battalions, and
appropriated eighty thousand pounds in provincial paper money to defray
the expenses of military preparation, Mr. Bancroft adds, that "extreme
discontent led the more determined to expose through the press the
trimming of the Assembly; and Franklin encouraged Thomas Paine, an
emigrant from England of the previous year, who was master of a
singularly lucid and attractive style, to write an appeal to the people
of America in favour of independence."[368] "Yet the men of that day had
been born and educated as subjects of a king; to them the House of
Hanover was a symbol of religious toleration, the British Constitution
another word for the security of liberty and property under a
representative government. They were not yet enemies of monarchy; they
had as yet turned away from considering whether well-organized civil
institutions could not be framed for wide territories without a king;
and in the very moment of resistance they longed to escape the necessity
of a revolution. Zubly, a delegate from Georgia, a Swiss by birth,
declared in his place 'a republic to be little better than a government
of devils;' shuddered at the idea of separation from Britain as fraught
with greater evils than had yet been suffered."[369]

The exact time when the minds of the leading men in the Colonies, and
the colonists, began to undergo a transition from the defence of their
constitutional liberties as British subjects to their security by
declaring independence of Great Britain, seems to have been the receipt
of the intelligence of the scornful rejection of the second petition of
Congress, and of the King's proclamation, putting the advocates of
colonial rights out of the protection of the law, by declaring them
rebels, and requiring all public officers, civil and military, to
apprehend them with a view to their punishment as such. Some individuals
of eminence in the colonies had previously despaired of reconciliation
with England, and had regarded Independency as the only hope of
preserving their liberties, but these were the exceptions: the leaders
and colonists generally still hoped for reconciliation with England by
having their liberties restored, as they were recognized and enjoyed at
the close of the French war in 1763. They had regarded the King as their
Father and Friend,