Not only were radicals constantly settling in the colonies, because of the privileges granted them there, but the Crown neglected to enforce in the colonies the same regulations that it enforced at home. The Act of Uniformity was not extended to the colonies, though rigidly enforced in England; the viceregal officers, the governors, permitted themselves again and again to be browbeaten and disobeyed by the colonial legislatures;[42] and even the king himself had allowed Massachusetts (1635) to overreach him by not giving up her charter.[43] After a century of great laxity toward the colonies--a century in which the colonists were favored by political privileges shared by no other people of that age; after the environment had established new social conditions, and remoteness and isolation had created a local and individual hatred of restraint; after the absence of traditions had made possible the institution of representation by population, and self-government had taken on a new meaning in the world; after a great gulf had been fixed between the social, political, and economic institutions of the two parts of the British empire--only then did the British government enter upon a policy intended to make the empire a unity.[44] Independence had long existed in spirit in most of the essential matters of colonial life, and the British government had only to seek to establish its power over the colonies in order to arouse a desire for formal independence. The transition in England, therefore, to an imperial ideal, about the middle of the eighteenth century, doubtless caused the rending of the empire. Walpole and Newcastle, whose administrations had just preceded the reign of George III., had let the colonies alone, and thus aided the colonial at the expense of the imperial idea; while their successors, Grenville and Townshend, ruling not wisely but too well, forced the colonists to realize that they cared more for America than for England. The time had come, though these ministers failed to see it, when the union of Great Britain with her colonies depended on the offspring’s disposition toward the mother-country. Good feeling would preserve the union, but dissatisfaction would make even forcible control impossible. Social and political and economic ties still bound the colonists to the home land, but these were weak ties as compared with an irrepressible desire for self-growth. The expression of their political ideals unrestrained by the conservatism of the parent was a desired end to which they strove, almost unconscious of their object.