. The Ministerial party triumphed; the advocates of
colonial rights were confounded, and their influence in and out of
Parliament was paralyzed. The power of the corrupt Ministers who had
been oppressing the colonies for ten years, was tottering to their fall;
they had played their last card; they had exhausted their credit; they
had staked their existence on the truth of the statements they had made,
and the accomplishment of the measures they had adopted; their measures
had failed; they saw that half-armed colonists had everywhere repulsed
the picked English generals and soldiers; their statements as to the
intentions and principles of the colonists would have also been
falsified had the Congress in 1776 adhered to the declaration of
principles and avowal of purposes which it had made in 1775; the friends
of American rights would have been triumphant, in and out of Parliament,
in England, and 1777 would doubtless have witnessed the overthrow of the
corrupt British Ministry, the constitutional freedom of the American
colonies in connection with the unity of the empire, instead of seven
years' bloody warfare, the destruction of the national life and of the
oneness of the Anglo-Saxon race.

III. But the Declaration of Independence on the part of its authors was
not only a violation of good faith to the statesmen and others in
England who had advocated the constitutional rights of the colonists, it
was also a violation both of good faith and justice to their colonial
fellow-countrymen who continued to adhere to connection with the mother
country upon the principles professed in all times past by the
separationists themselves.[397]

The adherents of connection with England had, with the exception of
certain office-holders and their relations, been as earnest advocates of
colonial rights as had the leaders of the separation. The opponents of
the constitutional rights of the colonies, in the colonies, were few and
far between--not numerous enough to form a party, or even to be called a
party. The Congress of 1775 declared the colonies to be "a unit" in
their determination to defend their rights, but disdained the idea of
separation from the mother country; and Mr. John Adams stated at the
same time: "All America is united in sentiment. When a masterly
statesman, to whom America has erected a statue in her heart for his
integrity, fortitude, and perseverance in her cause, invented a
Committee of Correspondence in Boston, did