nd council, were supposed to represent the
home government in the colonies.

But in reality there was no effective imperial control. The Crown, it
is true, appeared to have large powers. It granted charters,
established provinces by commissions, exercised the right to annul laws
and hear appeals from colonial decisions, exacted reports from
governors, sent instructions, and made appointments and removals at
will. But nearly all the colonial officials, except the few customs
officers, were paid out of colonial appropriations, and this one fact
sufficed to deprive them of any independent position. In nearly every
colony, the assembly, in the course of two-thirds of a century of
incessant petty conflict, of incessant wrangling and bargaining, of
incessant encroachments on the nominal legal powers of the governor,
had made itself master of the administration. The colonists resisted
all attempts to direct their military or civil policy, laid only such
taxes as they chose, raised only such troops as they saw fit, passed
only such laws as seemed to them desirable, and tied the governor's
hands by every sort of device. They usurped the {17} appointment of
the colonial treasurer, they appointed committees to oversee the
expenditure of sums voted, they systematically withheld a salary from
the governor, in order to render him dependent upon annual "presents,"
liable to diminution or termination in case he did not satisfy the
assembly's wishes. The history of the years from 1689 to 1763 is a
chronicle of continual defeat for governors who were obliged to see one
power after another wrenched away from them. Under the circumstances,
the political life of the thirteen colonies was practically republican
in character, and was as marked for its absence of administrative
machinery as the home government was for its aristocracy and
centralization.

Another feature of colonial life tended to accentuate this difference.
Although religion had ceased to be a political question, and the
English Church was no longer regarded, save in New England, as
dangerous to liberty, the fact that the great majority of the colonists
were dissenters--Congregational, Presbyterian, or Reformed, with a
considerable scattering of Baptists and other sects--had an effect on
the attitude of the people toward England. In the home country, the
controlling social classes accepted the established church as part of
the constitution; but in the colonies it ha