=119. George III.=[58]—The young king brought to the throne a very unfortunate mixture of good and bad qualities. He had an unblemished character; he had a strong will and was very conscientious and industrious; but he was possessed with the idea that the power of the throne should be greatly strengthened, and that all opposition to such increase of power should be put down, if need be, by main force. His ambition was to restore to the Crown the power which it had unlawfully exercised before the two English revolutions had made it subordinate to Parliament. For the accomplishment of this purpose he committed the fatal blunder of pushing aside the great statesmen he found in office and of surrounding himself with ministers who would aid him in carrying out his own policy. =120. Independent Spirit among the Colonies.=—Another peculiarity of the situation was the prevalence of a decided spirit of independence of one another among the individual colonies. No effort to bring them together for purposes of common action, even against the Indians, had been successful. Even Franklin’s plan in 1754 had failed to unite them (§ 110). On the contrary, they had drawn farther and farther apart, so that a very intelligent traveler, who had visited various parts of the country, wrote in 1760, “Were the colonies left to themselves, there would soon be civil war from one end of the continent to the other.” And James Otis, one of the foremost of American patriots, said in 1765, “Were the colonies left to themselves, to-morrow America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion before the little petty states could be united.” When George III. ascended the throne, the colonies seemed more afraid of one another than they were of England, and more likely to drift into separate nationalities like those of Europe than they were to unite in a common effort to secure independence of the mother country. THE QUESTION OF TAXATION. =121. Excuse for the Policy.=—The energetic and fatal policy of the Crown first showed itself in a determination to impose additional taxes on the Americans. There was some excuse for this policy. The Seven Years’ War had been carried on at heavy expense, and a large debt had been the result. The king claimed that this burden, chiefly incurred in an effort to protect the American colonists, should be borne, in large part, by the colonists themselves. To this claim the colonists might not have objected, if they had themselves been allowed a voice in determining their share of the tax. But the English insisted upon determining it without colonial advice.