As such an arrogant official, from yet unsealed Oxford heights, thus paternally looked down over Boston and New England, he could see in the little self-directing communities that clustered about the village church and the public school but a race of nobodies.  He may be pardoned for not finding greatness in art, literature, or science in the circle that has been called the Athens of America; he could not be expected to measure the rich and enduring fame of a Jonathan Edwards; and it was an article in the then Oxford creed, that there could not be, unmoulded by the influences of an hereditary nobility, such a general product as a people lifted up by education and religion into a self-directing race of high-minded men, as the basis of a State.  But a small class of British observers, who had other principles and other eyes, saw now in Boston the most orderly town and the most intelligent and moral people on the face of the earth; and said—­the words were printed (1768) in London, and reproduced in the local press here—­that no people since the ruin of the Roman Commonwealth seemed to entertain more just ideas of liberty or breathed forth a truer spirit of independence than these American colonists.  Now Governor Bernard and his political friends regarded the chafings of such a people at what they held to be palpable aggressions on their established system of local government as the acts of a trained mob, and proofs of a long-matured design to cast off allegiance to the British crown and of an immediate purpose of insurrection; and for years they systematically urged, and attempted to fortify their policy by the most unscrupulous misrepresentations, that nothing could check this anarchical element and traitorous design but the abrogation of fundamental parts of the local constitution and the implanting of a feudal exotic by military power.  The people claimed to be as free as the English were, and the calumnies were heaped on them of being anarchists and rebels.

This theory of insurrection was acted upon by the Governor as long as he remained in the Province.  Every hasty word of the violent, and every public deliberation of the wise as well, were made to nurture this theory.  By acting on such premises, besides doing gross injustice to the people, he made himself ridiculous.  Still he clung tenaciously to his error and his plans as long as he remained in office; and even after he returned to England, the course of the Patriots continued to strengthen his convictions, and he wrote back that it was “plainly the design of the chiefs of the Boston faction to measure swords with Great Britain.”