while they failed in chastising sedition in Massachusetts. The result was that they drove many men, who were loyal subjects of Great Britain in 1774, into revolution in 1776, while they allowed the rebels of Massachusetts to wreak vengeance at their will upon those who had been faithful in their allegiance to their king.[160] Besides those who were loyalists from conviction and temperament and those who were almost unavoidably so from the political position they occupied, there were also men who were loyalists from the profit it gave them. Such were the holders of the minor offices in the gift of the royal governors, the rich merchants who represented English trading-houses, and dreaded war and disturbance. There were others whose chief desire was to be upon the winning side, who were unable to conceive the possibility of the defeat of the English government by a handful of insurgent colonists, and some also who, from local or personal dislikes or prejudices, or from love of opposition, took a different side from that which was taken by their neighbors. It is probable, however, that there were hardly any whose motives were not to some extent mixed; few on the one hand so disinterested or so devoted as not to be moved in some degree by self-interest or prejudice, few on the other hand whose nature was so biassed by prejudice or so sordid with love of place or pension as not also to be moved by the higher impulse of fidelity. Loyalty is hard to define; it is one of those virtues which appeals not so much to the head as to the heart. Its critics accuse it of being irrational and illogical, as being based upon sentiment rather than upon conviction. Yet, in spite of logic and reason, or rather, on account of its profounder logic and higher reason, loyalty will hold its own, and strike an answering chord of admiration in the human heart as long as men appreciate disinterested virtue. It may be classed with the other unreasoned qualities that men yet esteem, with faith and truth, honor and courage, decency and chastity. It may be a man’s intellectual duty to follow the dictates of his understanding and to act upon his temporary convictions, whatever pain the action cost; nevertheless, the man whom we respect and follow is not the man who is always changing, who is easily influenced by argument, but the man who abides by certain fixed principles, and refuses to desert them, unless it can be shown him that beyond all chance of mistake they are wrong and misleading.