n
Temple Bar or London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning.

I am inclined to think that the opinion of a man who from 1765 to 1780
worked with that enactment hanging over his head is worth considering. I
find on picking up the first life of him that comes to hand, that he was
anything but blind to the consequences. England had shown her hand. She
outnumbered the colonists four to one; and, in the same proportion, she
could send a disciplined army against their undisciplined militia and
guerilla forces.

It was even worse than that. The colonists were not united in resisting
England; not nearly so unanimous as the Boers are. It was by no means
certain that our colonial rebel party had a bare majority. The loyalists
insisted and believed that they themselves had the majority. So if we
cut off from the supposed 3,000,000 population of the colonies the black
slaves who numbered about 800,000 and the loyalists who were even more
numerous, we had at the utmost only about 1,400,000 whites who were
prepared to resist the army, fleet, and 8,000,000 population of England
without counting nearly a million loyalists in their own midst.

In fact on the showing of hands it was an utterly hopeless contest, and
within a few years proved itself to be such. All that saved your
ancestor's party from complete annihilation was the assistance after
1778 of the French army, fleet, provisions, clothes and loans of money
followed by assistance from Spain, and at the last moment by the
alliance of Holland. And even with all this assistance your ancestor's
cause was even as late as the year 1780 generally believed to be a
hopeless one.

Your ancestor did not like the prospect. He was fully prepared for
misery, beggary and his family blood attainted and rendered infamous to
the last generation by the English law. Death was the least thing he
dreaded.

"I go mourning in my heart all the day long," he writes to his
wife, "though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and
anxious for my family. As for myself a frock and trousers, a hoe
and a spade would do for my remaining days."

"I feel unutterable anxiety," he writes again. "God grant us wisdom
and fortitude! Should the opposition be suppressed, should this
country submit, what infamy, what ruin, God forbid! Death in any
form is less terrible."

"There is one ugly reflection," he says in a letter to Joseph
Warren. "Brutus and Cassiu