noring the issue and 'not reading the dispatches' could no
longer be pursued; it was indeed largely responsible for the mischief.
George III. and Grenville deserve the credit of seeing this. But their
scheme of reconstruction not unnaturally amounted to little more than a
tightening-up of the old system. The trade laws were to be more
strictly enforced. The governors and the judges were to be made more
independent of the assemblies by being given fixed salaries. The
colonists were to bear a larger share of the cost of defence, which
fell so unfairly on the mother-country. If the necessary funds could be
raised by means approved by the colonists themselves, well and good;
but if not, then they must be raised by the authority of the imperial
parliament. For the existing system manifestly could not continue
indefinitely, and it was better to have the issue clearly raised, even
at the risk of conflict, than to go on merely drifting.

When the colonists (without suggesting any alternative proposals)
contented themselves with repudiating the right of parliament to tax
them, and proceeded to outrageous insults to the king's authority, and
the most open defiance of the trade regulations, indignation grew in
Britain. It seemed, to the average Englishman, that the colonists
proposed to leave every public burden, even the cost of judges'
salaries, on the shoulders of the mother-country, already loaded with a
debt which had been largely incurred in defence of the colonies; but to
disregard every obligation imposed upon themselves. A system whereunder
the colony has all rights and no enforcible duties, the mother-country
all duties and no enforcible rights, obviously could not work. That was
the system which, in the view of the gentlemen of England, the
colonists were bent upon establishing; and, taking this view, they
cannot be blamed for refusing to accept such a conclusion. There was no
one, either in Britain or in America, capable of grasping the
essentials of the problem, which were that, once established,
self-government inevitably strives after its own fulfilment; that these
British settlers, in whom the British tradition of self-government had
been strengthened by the freedom of a new land, would never be content
until they enjoyed a full share in the control of their own affairs;
and that although they seemed, even to themselves, to be fighting about
legal minutiae, about the difference between internal and external
duties,