causes of difficulty were not to be adjusted by mere lawyers, who adhered to the strict letter of the law, but by statesmen who recognised that the time had come for reconsidering the relations between the colonies and the parent state, and meeting the new conditions of their rapid development and political freedom.  These relations were not to be placed on an equitable and satisfactory basis by mob-violence and revolution.  All the questions at issue were of a constitutional character, to be settled by constitutional methods.

Unhappily, English statesmen of that day paid no attention to, and had no conception of, the aspirations, sentiments and conditions of the colonial peoples when the revolutionary war broke out.  The king wished to govern in the colonies as well as in the British Isles, and unfortunately the unwise assertion of his arrogant will gave dangerous men like Samuel Adams, more than once, the opportunity they wanted to stimulate public irritation and indignation against England.

It is an interesting fact, that the relations between Great Britain and the Canadian Dominion are now regulated by just such principles as were urged in the interests of England and her colonies a hundred and twenty years ago by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a great Loyalist, to whom justice is at last being done by impartial historians in the country where his motives and acts were so long misunderstood and misrepresented.  “Whatever measures,” he wrote to a correspondent in England, “you may take to maintain the authority of parliament, give me leave to pray they may be accompanied with a declaration that it is not the intention of parliament to deprive the colonies of their subordinate power of legislation, nor to exercise the supreme power except in such cases and upon such occasions as an equitable regard to the interests of the whole empire shall make necessary.”  But it took three-quarters of a century after the coming of the Loyalists to realise these statesmanlike conceptions of Hutchinson in the colonial dominions of England to the north of the dependencies which she lost in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Similar opinions were entertained by Joseph Galloway, Jonathan Boucher, Jonathan Odell, Samuel Seabury, Chief Justice Smith, Judge Thomas Jones, Beverley Robinson and other men of weight and ability among the Loyalists, who recognised the short-sightedness and ignorance of the British authorities, and the existence of real grievances.  Galloway, one of the ablest men on the constitutional side, and a member of the first continental congress, suggested a practical scheme of imperial federation, well worthy of earnest consideration at that crisis in imperial affairs.  Eminent men in the congress of 1774 supported this statesmanlike mode of placing the relations of England and the colonies on a basis which would enable them to work harmoniously, and at the same time give full scope to the ambition and the liberties of the colonial