Meanwhile the course of events was leading toward a new and unexpected goal.  Chief Justice Marshall said, as I have quoted, that 1763, the end of the French-Indian War, marked the greatest friendship and harmony between the Colonies and England.  The reason is plain.  In their incessant struggles with the French and the Indians, the Colonists had discovered a real champion and protector.  That protector, England, had found that she must really protect the Colonies unless she was willing to see them fall into the hands of her rival, France.  Putting forth her strength, she crushed France in America, and remained virtually in control not only of the Colonies and territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but also of British America.  In these respects the Colonies and the Mother Country seemed destined to be bound more closely together; but the very spirit by which Britain had conquered France in America, and France in India, and had made England paramount throughout the world, prevented the further fusion, moral, social, and political, of the Colonies with the Mother Country.

That spirit was the Imperial Spirit, which Plassey and Quebec had called to life.  The narrow Hanoverian King, who now ruled England, could not himself have devised the British Empire, but when the Empire crystallized, George III rightly surmised that, however it had come about, it meant a large increase in power for him.  The Colonies and Dependencies were to be governed like conquered provinces.  Evidently, the Hindus of Bengal could hardly be treated in the same fashion as were the Colonists of Massachusetts or Virginia.  The Bengalese knew that there was no bond of language or of race between them and their conquerors, whereas American Colonists knew that they and the British sprang from the same race and spoke the same language.  One of the first realizations that came to the British Imperialists was that the ownership of the conquered people or state warranted the conquerors in enriching themselves from the conquered.  But while this might do very well in India, and be accepted there as a matter of course, it would be most ill-judged in the American Colonies, for the Colonists were not a foreign nor a conquered people.  They originally held grants of land from the British Crown, but they had worked that land themselves and settled the wilderness by their own efforts, and had a right to whatever they might earn.

The Tory ideals, which took possession of the British Government when Lord Bute succeeded to William Pitt in power, were soon applied to England’s relations to the American Colonies.  The Seven Years’ War left England heavily in debt.  She needed larger revenues, and being now swayed by Imperialism, she easily found reasons for taxing the Colonies.  In 1765 she passed the Stamp Act which caused so much bad feeling that in less than a year she decided to repeal it, but new duties on paper, glass, tea, and other commodities were imposed instead.  In the