e were grievances which ought to be remedied. They
looked on the policy of the party in power in Great Britain as
injudicious in the extreme, but they believed that the relations between
the colonies and the mother-state could be placed on a more satisfactory
basis by a spirit of mutual compromise, and not by such methods as were
insidiously followed by the agitators against England. The Loyalists
generally contended for the legality of the action of parliament, and
were supported by the opinion of all high legal authorities; but the
causes of difficulty were not to be adjusted by mere lawyers, who
adhered to the strict letter of the law, but by statesmen who recognised
that the time had come for reconsidering the relations between the
colonies and the parent state, and meeting the new conditions of their
rapid development and political freedom. These relations were not to be
placed on an equitable and satisfactory basis by mob-violence and
revolution. All the questions at issue were of a constitutional
character, to be settled by constitutional methods.

Unhappily, English statesmen of that day paid no attention to, and had
no conception of, the aspirations, sentiments and conditions of the
colonial peoples when the revolutionary war broke out. The king wished
to govern in the colonies as well as in the British Isles, and
unfortunately the unwise assertion of his arrogant will gave dangerous
men like Samuel Adams, more than once, the opportunity they wanted to
stimulate public irritation and indignation against England.

It is an interesting fact, that the relations between Great Britain and
the Canadian Dominion are now regulated by just such principles as were
urged in the interests of England and her colonies a hundred and twenty
years ago by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a great Loyalist, to whom
justice is at last being done by impartial historians in the country
where his motives and acts were so long misunderstood and
misrepresented. "Whatever measures," he wrote to a correspondent in
England, "you may take to maintain the authority of parliament, give me
leave to pray they may be accompanied with a declaration that it is not
the intention of parliament to deprive the colonies of their subordinate
power of legislation, nor to exercise the supreme power except in such
cases and upon such occasions as an equitable regard to the interests of
the whole empire shall make necessary." But it took three-quarters of a
cen