by
computing the burden of a penny tax, or by exposing the sordid motives
of British merchants and Boston smugglers, still less by coming "armed
at all points with law cases and acts of Parliament, with the
statute-book doubled down in dog's ears" to defend either the cause of
liberty or authority. The issue, shot through and through, as all great
issues are, by innumerable sordid motives and personal enmities and
private ambitions, was yet one between differing ideals of justice and
welfare; one of those issues which, touching the emotional springs of
conduct, are never composed by an appeal to reason, which formal
argument the most correct, or the most skilled dialectic, serve only to
render more irreconcilable. "In Britain," said Bernard in 1765, "the
American governments are considered as corporations empowered to make
by-laws, existing only during the pleasure of Parliament. In America
they claim to be perfect states, no otherwise dependent upon Great
Britain than by having the same king." Few Englishmen could imagine an
empire of free states; few Americans could understand a nation bound
against its will.

The policy which history associates with the name of Grenville did not
originate with him, nor yet with his royal master, George III. It was
the unhappy experience of the Austrian Succession War that enforced upon
the English Government the necessity of a stricter attention to the
colonies. Ministers who then set themselves to read the American
dispatches were amazed to find the governors everywhere without adequate
support against the assemblies, the assemblies everywhere indifferent to
imperial interests. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle plantation
affairs were accordingly placed under the direction of the able Halifax;
and in 1752 the governors were instructed to transmit all correspondence
"to His Majesty by one of His Majesty's principal Secretaries of State."
To remedy an untoward situation many schemes were broached, on the eve
of the Seven Years' War, designed to bring the colonies "to a sense of
their duty to the king, to awaken them to take care of their lives and
fortunes." The need of the hour was a union of the colonies for military
defense; and in 1754, on the initiative of the English Government,
representatives from seven colonies adopted a scheme drafted by Franklin
and known as the Albany Plan of Union. It was ominous for the success of
all such attempts in the future that a plan which was th