It was the worst possible time the home government could have chosen in which to change its policy of concession towards the colonies and begin to tax and govern them by act of Parliament; and yet that was exactly what the ministers determined to do. No master of affairs or of men, like Walpole or Pitt, was any longer in a place of guiding authority in London. George Grenville was prime minister: a thorough official and very capable man of affairs, of unquestionable integrity, and with a certain not unhandsome courage as of conviction in what he did, but incapable of understanding those who opposed or resisted him, or of winning from them except by an exercise of power. The late war had been no mere “French and Indian” affair for English statesmen. It had been part of that stupendous “Seven Years’ War” which had fixed Prussia in a place of power under the great Frederick, and had changed the whole balance of power in Europe; had brought India under England’s widening dominion on one side of the world and America on the other,—had been a vast game which the stout little island kingdom had played almost alone against united Europe. It had not been a mere American war. America had reaped the benefits of England’s effort to found an empire and secure it, east and west. And yet the colonists seemed, when this momentous war by which they had so profited was over, to drop into indifference towards everything that remained to be done to finish what had been so well begun, even though it remained to be done at their own very doors.