zation."
Governor Hutchinson, one of the most aristocratic and most English of
Americans, was amazed to find himself but an alien in a far country
during the years of exile which gave him his first sight of English
society since 1742. Cultivated man of the world as he thought himself,
but Puritan still, it was with a profound sense of disillusionment that
he mingled with the "best people" of England. How pathetic are those
London letters of this unhappy exile who likes the people of Bristol
best because they remind him of Boston select-men, whose one desire is
to return home and lie buried in the land of his fathers! It is not too
fanciful to think that if Hutchinson had lived earlier in England he
might have died a patriot, whereas had Franklin seen as little of
England as his son he might have ended his days as a Loyalist. It was
"Old England" indeed that these cultivated Americans loved: the England
of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right; the England of Drake, of Pym
and Falkland, and of the Glorious Revolution; the little island kingdom
that harbored liberty and was the builder of an empire justly governed:
they thought of England in terms of her history, scarcely aware that her
best traditions were more cherished in the New World than in the Old.

Rarely, indeed, would an appeal to England's best traditions have met
with less cordial response among her rulers. For during the decade
following the Peace of Paris the vision of liberty was half obscured by
the vision of empire. Observant contemporaries noted the sudden rise of
an insular egoism following the war that in Voltaire's phrase saw
"England victorious in four parts of the world." Cowper was not alone in
complaining "that thieves at home must hang, but he that puts into his
over-gorged and bloated purse the wealth of Indian provinces, escapes";
and Horace Walpole has recorded in his incomparable letters, with a
cynical and an engaging wit which reflects the spirit of the times
better than his own sentiments, the corruption and prodigality, the
levity and low aims of that generation. With many noble exceptions, the
men who gathered round the young king, the men who "lived on their
country or died for her," who too often admired if they could not always
emulate the brutal degradation of a Sandwich or the matchless _abandon_
of the young Charles James Fox, had singularly little in common with
those American communities which the Frenchman Segur fancied "might ha