to London of the originators of the opposition to the Revenue Acts, Lord Hillsborough’s instructions to the Massachusetts Executive ran thus:—­“The King has thought fit to direct me to signify to you his Majesty’s commands that you do take the most effectual methods for procuring the fullest information that can be obtained touching all treasons or misprisions of treason committed within your government since the 30th day of December, 1767, and transmit the same to me, together with the names of persons who were most active in the commission of such offences.”

This language was addressed to Francis Bernard, who was at this time the highest representative of British power in Boston.  He was a native of England, an Oxford graduate, and, from the training of Solicitor of Doctors Commons, was sent over, by the favor of aristocratic relationship, to be the Governor of New Jersey, and now for eight years had been Governor of Massachusetts.  He was a scholar, and kept his memory of Alma Mater fresh.  He loved literature and science, could write elegies in Latin and Greek, used to say that he could repeat the whole of Shakspeare, and had such gifts of conversation as to charm the social circle.  His politics were of the Oxford school, and old at that.  He looked upon the people with distrust, and upon the king with veneration:  the people had good claim to be well governed, and British Imperialism had the divine right to govern them well.  He was a good hater of republican institutions; habitually spoke of the local self-government as a trained mob; and to it (he was not far from right here) he ascribed the temper of the community which he was set to care for and to rule.  It was vexatious to his Tory spirit to see the democratic element, which had excluded primogeniture and the hereditary principle and large landed estates, so firmly bedded here, as if for a mighty superstructure; and his reform plans tended to a change to centralization.  It was a marvel to him, that this work, which he deemed essential to the maintenance of British power here, had not been begun long before,—­that Charles II. had not made a clean sweep of the little New England republics.  He urged that this ought to be done now,—­that more general governments ought to take their place, with executives having vice-regal powers; and of course, being English, he urged that they should be moulded by England into a shape as nearly as possible like England and for the benefit of England, and thus be made homogeneous.  He sighed to impose the dazzle of a miniature St. James on reality-loving New England:  as though the soil which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of lords; as though the Norman role of privilege could be engrafted on a society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality:  and he clinched the absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British power, such as the presence of the King’s troops in a few coast-towns and the occupation of a few harbors by the royal navy, would soon settle the contest.