It has been sometimes asserted that loyalty can only be felt towards a personal ruler or a dynasty; such a restriction of the term is entirely unfounded. It is, by its very derivation, devotion to that which is legal and established. Legality and Loyalty are etymologically the same. No one can doubt that there is a high and noble devotion to right and justice which is as admirable and as strong as a devotion to any person. It is a more refined sentiment and appeals to a higher moral sense than does the simple fidelity to a person, beautiful and touching though such devotion be. The loyalty of men who, like the younger Verneys, espoused the side of the Parliament in its struggle with Charles the First, was as true and real a sentiment, though its character was impersonal, as was that of the stout Sir Edmund, who, though “he liked not the quarrel,” followed the king, because “he had eaten his bread too long to turn against him in his necessity.” There could hardly be a finer example of this loyalty to an idea than was shown by those Americans who condemned the stupid errors of the king and his advisers, and realized fully the danger to liberty in the system of government that George the Third was attempting to carry out in England and in America, and yet, in spite of all, remained patriotic subjects, not from affection but from principle, trusting to constitutional methods to overcome the evils which they felt as strongly as any of those who made them a justification for revolution. As has been shown, among those who adhered to the side of the mother country in the revolution there were men of all kinds and convictions. There were those who were loyal because they believed in the legal right of the Parliament to tax the colonies, short-sighted as the policy might be, and considered their duty and their allegiance to be due to the united empire. There were those who adhered to the king’s cause from personal devotion to him and to his dynasty, an unreasonable devotion in the eyes of some, but certainly not as contemptible as American satirists have loved to describe it. There were those who were by nature conservatives, willing to do anything sooner than change, governed completely by a prejudice which hardly deserves the noble name of loyalty, but still had in it an element of steadiness and sturdiness that redeems it from contempt. There were also, undoubtedly, men who calculated the chances of victory in the struggle and espoused the side that they thought was likely to win; there were those who were for the king from pure gregariousness, because some of their friends and neighbors were on that side; and, finally, some who, from a mere love of opposition, set themselves against the cause of America because their neighbors and townsmen favored it.