Firm as the American leaders were in the statement and defense of their rights, there is every reason for believing that in the beginning they hoped to confine the conflict to the realm of opinion.  They constantly avowed that they were loyal to the king when protesting in the strongest language against his policies.  Even Otis, regarded by the loyalists as a firebrand, was in fact attempting to avert revolution by winning concessions from England.  “I argue this cause with the greater pleasure,” he solemnly urged in his speech against the writs of assistance, “as it is in favor of British liberty ... and as it is in opposition to a kind of power, the exercise of which in former periods cost one king of England his head and another his throne.”

=Burke Offers the Doctrine of Conciliation.=—­The flooding tide of American sentiment was correctly measured by one Englishman at least, Edmund Burke, who quickly saw that attempts to restrain the rise of American democracy were efforts to reverse the processes of nature.  He saw how fixed and rooted in the nature of things was the American spirit—­how inevitable, how irresistible.  He warned his countrymen that there were three ways of handling the delicate situation—­and only three.  One was to remove the cause of friction by changing the spirit of the colonists—­an utter impossibility because that spirit was grounded in the essential circumstances of American life.  The second was to prosecute American leaders as criminals; of this he begged his countrymen to beware lest the colonists declare that “a government against which a claim of liberty is tantamount to high treason is a government to which submission is equivalent to slavery.”  The third and right way to meet the problem, Burke concluded, was to accept the American spirit, repeal the obnoxious measures, and receive the colonies into equal partnership.

=Events Produce the Great Decision.=—­The right way, indicated by Burke, was equally impossible to George III and the majority in Parliament.  To their narrow minds, American opinion was contemptible and American resistance unlawful, riotous, and treasonable.  The correct way, in their view, was to dispatch more troops to crush the “rebels”; and that very act took the contest from the realm of opinion.  As John Adams said:  “Facts are stubborn things.”  Opinions were unseen, but marching soldiers were visible to the veriest street urchin.  “Now,” said Gouverneur Morris, “the sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore.”  It was too late to talk about the excellence of the British constitution.  If any one is bewildered by the controversies of modern historians as to why the crisis came at last, he can clarify his understanding by reading again Edmund Burke’s stately oration, On Conciliation with America.

=References=

G.L.  Beer, British Colonial Policy (1754-63).

E. Channing, History of the United States, Vol.  III.