English statesmen, however, saw the danger of union among the colonies long before the outbreak of the Revolution; and they shrewdly rejected the plan of union of the Albany conference of 1754; and in the Revolution itself a large part of England’s diplomatic and military efforts were directed towards breaking up the easy communication among the colonies. In modern times England’s colonies have been widely separated from one another. There has been no large and rapidly increasing white population on contiguous territory with ability for union. The dark-skinned population of India is enormous in numbers, but incapable of the united action of the Americans of 1776, and India is not considered a colony but a territory continuously held by overwhelming military force. Instead of a colonial population which threatened in a short time to outnumber her own people, England’s power and population have, in modern times, grown far beyond any power or population in her well-scattered white colonies. The colonists at the time of the Revolution have often been described as speaking of England as home and regarding the mother-country with no little degree of affection; and while there is no doubt some truth in this, especially as regards the people who were loyalists, yet a very large proportion of the colonists had become totally differentiated from the people of England. This was the inevitable result of having lived for over a hundred years in the American environment. They were no longer Englishmen. They had become completely Americanized. Certain classes kept up their connection with England, and many of the rich planters of the South sent their sons to England to be educated. But a very large part of the colonists, especially in the older settled provinces, like Massachusetts and Virginia, had forgotten England and were another people. Instead of speaking, as novelists often describe them, in a formal archaic way, using quaint phrases of old English life, the colonists spoke with mannerisms and colloquial slang which were peculiarly American. These peculiarities were ridiculed by Englishmen of the time and formed part of Grant’s famous speech in Parliament, the burden of which appears to have been that the colonists had become entirely different from English people, and Grant is said to have given imitations of what he considered their strange speech and manners. Mrs. Knight, in her _Journal of Travel from Boston to New York_, had, many years before the Revolution, given specimens of this difference; and the language of the New Englanders which she describes was certainly not like anything in England. “Law for me—what in the world brings you here at this time of night? I never see a woman on the Rode so Dreadful late in all the days of my versall life. Who are you? Where are you going?”—Mrs. Knight’s _Journal_, p. 23.