The causes which had brought the two countries to this pass lie deeper than the hostile designs of ministers, or the ambition of colonial agitators bent on revolution. It has been said that the Revolution was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. A misunderstanding it was, sure enough, in one sense; but if by misunderstanding is meant lack of information there is more truth in the famous epigram which has it that Grenville lost the colonies because he read the American dispatches, which none of his predecessors had done. In the decade before the Declaration of Independence every exchange of ideas drove the two countries farther apart, and personal contact alienated more often than it reconciled the two peoples. It was the years of actual residence in England that cooled Franklin's love for the mother country. "Had I never been in the American colonies," he writes in 1772, "but was to form my judgement of civil society from what I have lately seen, I should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilization." Governor Hutchinson, one of the most aristocratic and most English of Americans, was amazed to find himself but an alien in a far country during the years of exile which gave him his first sight of English society since 1742. Cultivated man of the world as he thought himself, but Puritan still, it was with a profound sense of disillusionment that he mingled with the "best people" of England. How pathetic are those London letters of this unhappy exile who likes the people of Bristol best because they remind him of Boston select-men, whose one desire is to return home and lie buried in the land of his fathers! It is not too fanciful to think that if Hutchinson had lived earlier in England he might have died a patriot, whereas had Franklin seen as little of England as his son he might have ended his days as a Loyalist. It was "Old England" indeed that these cultivated Americans loved: the England of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right; the England of Drake, of Pym and Falkland, and of the Glorious Revolution; the little island kingdom that harbored liberty and was the builder of an empire justly governed: they thought of England in terms of her history, scarcely aware that her best traditions were more cherished in the New World than in the Old.