up to tease the government with stinging letters which no one could successfully answer, because no one could match their wit or point; an independent press came almost suddenly into existence; and because there was no opinion expressed in the House of Commons worthy of being called the opinion of the nation, public opinion formed and asserted itself outside the Houses, and began to clamor uncomfortably for radical constitutional reforms. Mr. Wilkes was expelled the House in 1769, just as the trouble in America was thickening towards storm; and long before that trouble was over it had become plain to every man of enlightened principle that agitation in England and resistance in America had one and the same object,—the rectification of the whole spirit and method of the English government. [Illustration: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS] George III. had too small a mind to rule an empire, and the fifteen years of his personal supremacy in affairs (1768-1783) were years which bred a revolution in England no less inevitably than in America. His stubborn instinct of mastery made him dub the colonists “rebels” upon their first show of resistance; he deemed the repeal of the Stamp Act a fatal step of weak compliance, which had only “increased the pretensions of the Americans to absolute independence.” Chatham he called a “trumpet of sedition” because he praised the colonists for their spirited assertion of their rights. The nature of the man was not sinister. Neither he nor his ministers had any purpose of making “slaves” of the colonists. Their measures for the regulation of the colonial trade were incontestably conceived upon a model long ago made familiar in practice, and followed precedents long ago accepted in the colonies. Their financial measures were moderate and sensible enough in themselves, and were conceived in the ordinary temper of law-making. What they did not understand or allow for was American opinion. What the Americans, on their part, did not understand or allow for was the spirit in which Parliament had in fact acted. They did not dream with how little comment or reckoning upon consequences, or how absolutely without any conscious theory as to power or authority, such statutes as those which had angered them had been passed; how members of the Commons stared at Mr. Burke’s passionate protests and high-pitched arguments of constitutional privilege; how unaffectedly astonished they were at the rebellious outbreak which followed in the colonies. And, because they were surprised and had intended no tyranny, but simply the proper government of trade and the adequate support of administration throughout the dominions of the crown, as the ministers had represented these things to them, members of course thought the disturbances at Boston a tempest in a teapot, the reiterated protests of the colonial assemblies a pretty piece of much ado about nothing. The radical trouble was that the Parliament really