on were not without importance. It is difficult for us,
living in an age when a man may breakfast in Philadelphia and dine the
same day in Boston, to remember that Franklin was "about a fortnight"
making the same distance in 1724. Yet a quarter of a century later, when
the means of travel were not much more expeditious even if they were
more certain, men journeyed continuously up and down the road that led
from Boston to New York and Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia out into
the back country and along the Shenandoah Valley. So much so, that the
inhabitants of the little town of New Brunswick, says Peter Kalm, "get
a considerable profit from the travellers who every hour pass through on
the high road." Communication by correspondence, immensely facilitated
after the establishment of the "General Post Office" by Parliament in
1710, served often to create cordial relations between men living in
different colonies; men who perhaps had never seen each other, and who
might have been, as the good John Adams sometimes was, disillusioned by
personal contact. Newspapers, long since established in Philadelphia and
Charleston, as well as in New York and Boston, regularly carrying the
latest intelligence from every colony into every other, wore away
provincial prejudice and strengthened intercolonial solidarity by
revealing the common character of governmental organization and of
political issues from Massachusetts to South Carolina. The assembly at
Williamsburg or at Philadelphia, guarding local privileges against the
encroachments of prerogative, was made aware that in fundamentals the
conflict was American rather than merely provincial, and proclaimed its
rights more stubbornly and with far greater confidence for knowing that
assemblies in New York and Boston were enlisted in the common cause.

In strengthening this sense of political solidarity, the last French
wars were of great importance. Aroused as never before to a realization
of the common danger, colonial Governments cooeperated, imperfectly,
indeed, but on a scale and with a unanimity hitherto unknown, in an
undertaking which none could doubt was of momentous import to America
and to the world. Never before were so many men from different colonies
brought into personal contact with one another; never before had so many
Americans of all classes heard the speech and observed the manners of
Britons. It was an experience not to be forgotten. The Puritan recruit
from Massac