no means a wise move. But intense feeling on the subject was aroused.
Passionate feeling seemed to have been running very high among the
steady Quakers. In this new outburst the Quakers had the Scotch-Irish on
their side, and a part of the Churchmen. The Germans were divided, but
the majority enthusiastic for the change was very large.

There was a new alignment of parties. The eastern Presbyterians, usually
more or less in sympathy with the Scotch-Irish, broke away from them
on this occasion. These Presbyterians opposed the change to a royal
governor because they believed that it would be followed by the
establishment by law of the Church of England, with bishops and all the
other ancient evils. Although some of the Churchmen joined the Quaker
side, most of them and the most influential of them were opposed to the
change and did good work in opposing it. They were well content with
their position under the proprietors and saw nothing to be gained under
a royal governor. There were also not a few people who, in the increase
of the wealth of the province, had acquired aristocratic tastes and were
attached to the pleasant social conditions that had grown up round the
proprietary governors and their followers; and there were also those
whose salaries, incomes, or opportunities for wealth were more or less
dependent on the proprietors retaining the executive offices and the
appointments and patronage.

One of the most striking instances of a change of sides was the case of
a Philadelphia Quaker, John Dickinson, a lawyer of large practice, a man
of wealth and position, and of not a little colonial magnificence when
he drove in his coach and four. It was he who later wrote the famous
"Farmer's Letters" during the Revolution. He was a member of the
Assembly and had been in politics for some years. But on this question
of a change to royal government, he left the Quaker majority and opposed
the change with all his influence and ability. He and his father-in-law,
Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, became the leaders against
the change, and Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the latter afterwards a
prominent loyalist in the Revolution, were the leading advocates of the
change.

The whole subject was thoroughly thrashed out in debates in the Assembly
and in pamphlets of very great ability and of much interest to students
of colonial history and the growth of American ideas of liberty. It must
be remembered that this was the yea