husetts might write home lamenting the scandalous irreligion
that prevailed among the levies from other colonies; but the irritating
condescension of British regulars made him aware that he had after all
more in common with the most unregenerate American than with any
Englishman. The provincial, subtly conscious of his limitations when
brought into contact with more traveled and cosmopolitan men, endures
less readily than any other to be reminded of his inferiority. Who shall
estimate the effect upon the proud and self-contained Washington of
intercourse with supercilious British officers during the Braddock
expedition? In how many unrecorded instances did a similar experience
produce a similar effect? No bitterness endures like that of the
provincial despised because of his provincialism. He has no recourse but
to make a virtue of his defects, and prove himself superior by
condemning qualities which he may once have envied. And Americans were
the more confirmed in this attitude by the multiplied proofs of the
Englishman's real inferiority for the business in hand. Who were these
men from oversea to instruct natives in the art of frontier
warfare?--men who proclaimed their ignorance of the woods by standing
grouped and red-coated in the open to be shot down by Indians whom they
could not see! From the experience of the last French war there emerged
something of that sublime self-confidence which stamps the true
American. And in that war was generated a sense of spiritual separation
from England never quite felt before--something of the contempt of the
frontiersman for the tenderfoot who comes from the sheltered existence
of cities to instruct him in the refinements of life.

After the Peace of Paris provincial politics takes on, indeed, a certain
militant and perfervid character hitherto unknown, and not wholly due to
the restrictive measures of the Grenville Ministry. It was as if the
colonists, newly stirred by a naive, primitive egoism, still harboring
the memory of unmerited slights, of services unappreciated oven if paid
for, had carried over into secular activities some fanatical strain from
the Great Awakening, something of the intensity of deep-seated moral
convictions. And in no unreal sense this was so. The mantle of Samuel
Davies fell upon Patrick Henry. The flood tide of religious emotionalism
ebbed but to flow in other channels? and men who had been so profoundly
stirred by the revivalist were the more readi