any fate that
destiny may allot to him."

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST GUN

Meanwhile the course of events was leading toward a new and unexpected
goal. Chief Justice Marshall said, as I have quoted, that 1763, the
end of the French-Indian War, marked the greatest friendship and
harmony between the Colonies and England. The reason is plain. In
their incessant struggles with the French and the Indians, the
Colonists had discovered a real champion and protector. That
protector, England, had found that she must really protect the
Colonies unless she was willing to see them fall into the hands of
her rival, France. Putting forth her strength, she crushed France in
America, and remained virtually in control not only of the Colonies
and territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but also of
British America. In these respects the Colonies and the Mother Country
seemed destined to be bound more closely together; but the very spirit
by which Britain had conquered France in America, and France in India,
and had made England paramount throughout the world, prevented the
further fusion, moral, social, and political, of the Colonies with the
Mother Country.

That spirit was the Imperial Spirit, which Plassey and Quebec had
called to life. The narrow Hanoverian King, who now ruled England,
could not himself have devised the British Empire, but when the Empire
crystallized, George III rightly surmised that, however it had come
about, it meant a large increase in power for him. The Colonies and
Dependencies were to be governed like conquered provinces. Evidently,
the Hindus of Bengal could hardly be treated in the same fashion as
were the Colonists of Massachusetts or Virginia. The Bengalese knew
that there was no bond of language or of race between them and their
conquerors, whereas American Colonists knew that they and the British
sprang from the same race and spoke the same language. One of the
first realizations that came to the British Imperialists was that the
ownership of the conquered people or state warranted the conquerors in
enriching themselves from the conquered. But while this might do very
well in India, and be accepted there as a matter of course, it would
be most ill-judged in the American Colonies, for the Colonists were
not a foreign nor a conquered people. They originally held grants of
land from the British Crown, but they had worked that land themselves
and settled the wilderness by their own efforts