represented nobody but the King and his “friends,” and was both ignorant and unreflective upon the larger matters it dealt with. [Illustration: PAGE FROM THE DIARY OF JOSIAH QUINCY] It was the more certain that the promises of accommodation and peaceful constitutional reform which the supporters of the government in America so freely and earnestly made would be falsified, and that exasperation would follow exasperation. The loyal partisans of the crown in the colonies understood as little as did the radical patriotic party the real attitude and disposition of the King and his ministers. The men with whom they were dealing over sea had not conceived and could not conceive the American point of view with regard to the matters in dispute. They did not know whereof Mr. Burke spoke when he told them that the colonial assemblies had been suffered to grow into a virtual independence of Parliament, and had become in fact, whatever lawyers might say, coördinated with it in every matter which concerned the internal administration of the colonies; and that it was now too late to ask or expect the colonists to accept any other view of the law than that which accorded with long-established fact. Mr. Burke admitted that his theory was not a theory for the strict lawyer: it was a theory for statesmen, for whom fact must often take precedence of law. But the men he addressed were strict legists and not statesmen. There could be no understanding between the two sides of the water; and the loyalists who counselled submission, if only for a time, to the authority of the ministers, were certain to be rejected among their own people. The spirit of American affairs was with the patriots, and would be with them more and more as the quarrel thickened. [Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE KING FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF THE REBELLION] It thickened fast enough, and the storm broke before men were aware how near it was. While winter held (1774-1775), affairs everywhere grew dark and uneasy, not only in Massachusetts, where Gage’s troops waited at Boston, but in every colony from Maine to the Gulf. Before the end of 1774 the Earl of Dunmore reported to the government, from Virginia, that every county was “arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of protecting their committees,” and that his own power of control was gone. “There is not a justice of peace in Virginia,” he declared, “that acts except as a committee-man”; and it gave him the graver concern to see the turn affairs were taking because “men of fortune and pre-eminence joined equally with the lowest and meanest” in the measures resorted to to rob him of authority. [Illustration: GAGE’S ORDER PERMITTING INHABITANTS TO LEAVE BOSTON]