It is plain to-day that the only way to keep up the nominal union between Great Britain and her colonies was to let them alone. The colonies felt strongly the ties of blood, interest, and affection which bound them to England.[63] They would all have vowed, after the repeal of the Stamp Act, that they loved their parent much more than they loved one another. They felt only the normal adult instinct to act independently. Could the British government have given up the imperial idea to which it so tenaciously clung, a federal union might have been preserved. The genius of dissolution, however, gained control of the ministry which next came into power. When illness withdrew Pitt from the “Mosaic Ministry,” which he and Grafton had formed, Townshend’s brilliant talents gave him the unquestioned lead. This man, who is said to have surpassed Burke in wit and Chatham in solid sense, determined to try again to tax the colonies for imperial purposes.[64] He ridiculed the distinction between external and internal tax; but since the colonists had put stress on the illegality of the latter he laid the new tax on imported articles, and prepared to collect at the customhouses. The income was to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, and thus render them independent of the tyrannical and contentious assemblies. Writs of assistance, so effective in enforcing the revenue laws but so hated by the colonists, were legalized. The collection of the revenue was further aided by admiralty courts, which should try the cases without juries, thus preventing local sympathy from shielding the violators of the law.[65] All the indifference into which America had relapsed, and which the agitators so much deplored, at once disappeared. The right of trial by jury was held to be inalienable. The control of the judiciary and executive by the people was necessary to free government, asserted the pamphleteers. Parliament could not legalize “writs of assistance,” they rashly cried. The former stickling at an internal tax was forgotten, and they objected to any tax whatever--a more logical position, which John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, supported by the assertion “that any law, in so far as it creates expense, is in reality a tax.” Samuel Adams drew up a circular letter, which the Massachusetts assembly dispatched to the other colonial assemblies, urging concerted action against this new attack on colonial liberties.[66] The British government, through the colonial governors, attempted to squelch this letter, but the Massachusetts assembly refused to rescind, and the other colonies were quick to embrace its cause. Signs were not wanting that the people as well as the political leaders were aroused. When the customs officials, in 1768, seized John Hancock’s sloop _Liberty_ for alleged evasion of the customs duties, there was a riot which so frightened the officers that they fled to the fort and wrote to England for soldiers.