as it was then clear to a few, that the passing of the tea and paper bill, made the difference between the crown and the colonists irreconcilable, and that nothing but the death of the king could prevent a war. The nine succeeding years were spent by the contending parties in struggling for position,--the colonies becoming more indifferent to the mother country, and the mother country less disposed to put up with the pretensions of her offspring. Franklin, when he went to London in 1764, confidently expected to return in the following year; but he was not destined to leave England till ten years later, and then with the depressing suspicion that the resources of diplomacy were exhausted. Meantime he remitted no effort to find some middle ground of conciliation. Equipped with the additional authority derived from commissions to act as the agent of the provinces of Massachusetts, of New Jersey, and of Georgia, and with a social influence never possessed probably by any other American representative at the English court, he would doubtless have prevented the final alienation of the colonies, if such a result, under the circumstances, had been possible. But it was not. The colonists were Englishmen for the most part, and they could not be brought to make concessions which would have dishonoured them; and Franklin was not the man to ask of them such concessions. He took the position that "the parliament had no right to make any law whatever binding the colonies; that the king, and not the king, Lords, and Commons collectively, was their sovereign; and that the king, with _their_ respective parliaments, is their only legislator." In other words, he asked only what England has since granted to all her colonies, and what, but for the fatuous obstinacy of the king, who at this time was rather an object of commiseration than of criticism, she would undoubtedly have yielded. But under the pressure of the crown, negotiation and debate seemed rather to aggravate the differences than to remove them. The solemn petitions of the colonists to the throne were treated with neglect or derision, and their agents with contumely, and Franklin was openly insulted in the House of Lords, was deprived of his office of deputy-postmaster, and was scarcely safe from personal outrage. Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he placed his agencies in the hands of Arthur Lee, an American lawyer practising at the London bar, and on the 21st of March 1775, again set sail for Philadelphia. On reaching home his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the empire was dissipated by the news which awaited him of collisions which had occurred, some two weeks previous, between the people and the royal troops at Concord and at Lexington. He found the colonies in flagrant rebellion, and himself suddenly transformed from a peacemaker into a warmaker.