had, by virtue of the recent peace, become but a small part. British statesmen felt the imperative need of correcting the slothful and unsystematic methods of colonial management by which some of the older colonies had been granted more liberal government than that enjoyed by organized territories of the United States today, and under which all the continental American colonies had become neglectful or defiant of ordinary imperial obligations. There was a need that all the outlying British possessions should be more closely integrated for purposes of administration and that the far-flung empire should be defended against the ambitions of England's traditional enemies, France and Spain, as well as against the restlessness of the alien subject populations. The problem which confronted the British government was much more difficult than the questions of colonial organization with which the American government has wrestled since 1898; but the American adventure in imperialism, involving, as it did, the question of whether the constitution followed the flag, should enable Americans of the present generation to view with sympathy the British experiment of the eighteenth century.

The king's ministers glimpsed too narrowly the task before them. What they regarded as an exercise in the mechanics of legislation was really an innovation in imperial relations that touched the dynamic currents of colonial opinion and colonial economic interest at many vital points. Moreover their attempt was being made at a time when the colonies were, for the first time in their history, relieved of their most urgent need of British protection by the removal of the French menace from their frontiers. Under the earlier imperial policy of "salutary neglect" the colonies had grown in wealth and political capacity, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century they had become accustomed to conduct themselves toward England as substantially equal commonwealths in a federation. For them the new imperial policy involved additional tax burdens, loss of trading profits and limitations of self-government, liberties that were none the less precious because derived from an unwritten and unsanctioned constitution. Fundamentally, the great problem of the decade following the peace of 1763 was the

problem of the reconciliation of centralized imperial control with colonial home rule. This, unfortunately, was never clearly perceived by the dominant element on either side, the issue being obscured by a blind officialism on the one hand and by an unillumined particularism on the other.

Perhaps the problem was incapable of solution; but we can see now that the best opportunity for a satisfactory outcome lay in the application to the situation of an enlightened statecraft on the part of Great Britain. To this the posture of political affairs in the country was not well adapted. George III, who had ascended the throne in 1760, was already devoting every political and financial resource in his power to the task of converting the British government from an aristocracy of great Whig families into a personal autocracy. His parliament and ministers did not seek to reflect the aspirations of the British public and therefore lacked a potent incentive for the formulation of a conciliatory program of colonial subordination. The minority in parliament represented by Pitt and Burke readily identified the struggle of the colonists to preserve home rule with their own struggle in England against autocratic rule. Pitt was thinking primarily of Englishmen at home when he exclaimed on the occasion of the Stamp Act commotions: "I rejoice that America has resisted." If his counsels had been followed by the government, it is entirely possible that the colonial revolt might have been forestalled by some plan of, imperial federation.

With this brief view of affairs in Great Britain it is now possible to consider the situation in America. Conditions there were both simpler and more complex than the traditional accounts represent. In place of thirteen units of population thinking alike on most public questions, there were in fact two or possibly three major groupings of population, differentiated by physiographical conditions, economic interests and political ideals. The communities on the coastal plain from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania constituted one of these divisions; the settlements of the tidewater regions from Maryland to Georgia formed another; and the third, less clearly outlined geographically, consisted of the western sections of many of the

provinces. These three divisions represented modes of living and attitudes of mind much more fundamental than those indicated by arbitrary political boundaries.

The first area may conveniently be called the commercial section because the dominant economic interest of the people was the carrying trade and shipbuilding. Here great mercantile families had grown up, who had gained their wealth through smuggling with the West Indies or else through legitimate trading enterprises that embraced the entire world. The merchants were keenly alive to the golden benefits which membership in the British empire had always yielded; and like the business interests of any generation or clime, they might be expected to combat any effort to tamper with the source of their profits. For the merchants the unfolding of the new imperial program involved a very serious interference with their customary trading operations; and during the decade from 1764 to 1774 their constant aim was to effect a restoration of the commercial conditions of 1763. As a class they entertained neither earlier nor later the idea of independence, for withdrawal from the British empire meant for them the loss of vital business advantages without corresponding benefits in a world organized on a basis of imperial trading systems. They strove to obtain the most favorable terms possible within the empire but not to leave it. Indeed they viewed with no small concern the growth of republican feeling and leveling sentiment which the controversy occasioned.

The great ports of the north-Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport-bore eloquent testimony to the prosperity of the mercantile class; and on the continuance of this prosperity depended the livelihood of the mechanics and petty shopkeepers of the towns and, to a lesser degree, the well-being of the farmers whose cereals and meats were exported to the West Indies. This proletarian element was not inclined by temperament to that self-restraint in movements of popular protest which was ever the arrière pensée of the merchant class; and being for the most part unenfranchised, they expressed their sentiments most naturally through boisterous mass meetings and mob demonstrations.

In the southern coastal area colonial capital was invested almost exclusively in plantation production; and commerce was carried on chiefly by British mercantile houses and their American agents, the factors. The only town in the plantation provinces that could compare with the teeming ports of the north was Charleston; and political life was focused in the periodical meetings of the great landed proprietors in the assemblies. Under the wasteful system of marketing, which the apparent plenty of plantation life made possible, the planters found themselves treading a morass of indebtedness to British merchants from which it seemed that nothing less than virtual repudiation could extricate them. In the last twenty-five years of colonial dependence the assemblies passed a succession of lax bankruptcy acts and other legislation prejudicial to nonresident creditors; but these laws nearly always ran afoul the royal veto. This fact, together with the sturdy sense of selfdetermination which the peculiar social system fostered, made the plantation provinces ready to resent any new exercise of parliamentary authority over the colonies, such as the new imperial policy involved. Georgia, as the youngest colony, not yet self-sustaining, and dependent on the home government for protection against a serious Indian menace, was less a part of this picture than the other provinces of the group.

On the western fringe of the coastal communities lay an irregular belt of back-country settlements whose economy and modes of thought were almost as distinctive as those of the two tidewater regions. Certainly the western sections of many of the provinces had grievances in common and resembled each other more than they did the older sections with which they were associated by provincial boundaries. These pioneer settlements extended north and south, up and down the valleys between the fall line of the rivers and mountains, from New England to Georgia. Outside of New England the majority of the settlers were of non-English strains, mostly German and Scotch-Irish; but throughout the long frontier the people cultivated small isolated farms and entertained democratic ideas commensurate with the equalitarian conditions to which their manner of living accustomed them. In many of the provinces

they had long been discriminated against by the older settlements in the matter of representation in the assemblies, the administration of justice and the incidence of taxation; and they were thus familiar, of their own experience, with all the arguments which the Revolution was to make popular against non-representative government and unjust taxation. Being self-sustaining communities economically, their zeal for popular rights was in no wise alloyed by the embarrassment of their pocketbooks. Although out of harmony with the popular leaders of the seaboard in both the commercial and plantation provinces on many matters of intracolonial policy, they could join forces with them against the new imperial policy; and they brought to the controversy a moral conviction and bold philosophy which gave great impetus to the agitation for independence.'

The history of the American Revolution is the story of the reaction of these three sections to the successive acts of the British government and of their interaction upon each other. The merchants of the commercial colonies were the most seriously affected by the new imperial policy and at the outset assumed the leadership of the colonial movement of protest. They were closely seconded by the planters of the south as soon as enough time had elapsed to make clear to the latter the implications of the issue of home rule for which the merchants stood. The democratic farmers of the interior, more or less out of contact with the political currents of the seaboard, were slower to take part; and it is largely true that their measure of participation varied inversely according to the degree of their isolation. Patrick Henry and his fellow burgesses from the western counties of Virginia began to undermine the conserv

1In Georgia, however, the frontier settlers were pro-British in their sympathies because of their dependence on the home government for protection against the everpresent menace of the Creeks. Twenty-five years ago Professor J. S. Bassett, in a discriminating study, showed why the people of the interior counties of North Carolina became loyalists when the issue of independence was raised. Had the friction between the interior democracies and coastal minorities developed to the point of armed rebellion in other provinces prior to 1776, the back-country folk might everywhere have thrown their weight on the side of the British government and thus have defeated the Revolution.