One of the earliest and ablest of its assailants was Thomas Hutchinson, the last civil governor of the colony of Massachusetts, who, being stranded in London by the political storm which had blown him thither, published there, in the autumn of 1776, his “Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia,” wherein, with an unsurpassed knowledge of the origin of the controversy, and with an unsurpassed acumen in the discussion of it, he traverses the entire document, paragraph by paragraph, for the purpose of showing that its allegations in support of American Independence are “false and frivolous.” A better written, and, upon the whole, a more plausible and a more powerful arraignment of the great Declaration was the celebrated pamphlet by Sir John Dalrymple, “The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of America: Being an Answer to the Declaration of the General Congress,”—a pamphlet scattered broadcast over the world at such a rate that at least eight editions of it were published during the last three or four months of the year, 1776. Here, again, the manifesto of Congress is subjected to a searching examination, in order to prove that “the facts are either willfully or ignorantly misrepresented, and the arguments deduced from premises that have no foundation in truth.” It is doubtful if any disinterested student of history, any competent judge of reasoning, will now deny to this pamphlet the praise of making out a very strong case against the historical accuracy and the logical soundness of many parts of the Declaration of Independence. Undoubtedly, the force of such censures is for us much broken by the fact that they proceeded from men who were themselves partisans in the Revolutionary controversy, and bitterly hostile to the whole movement which the Declaration was intended to justify. Such is not the case, however, with the leading modern English critics of the same document, who while blaming in severe terms the policy of the British Government toward the Thirteen Colonies, have also found much to abate from the confidence due to this official announcement of the reasons for our secession from the empire. For example, Earl Russell, after frankly saying that the great disruption proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence was a result which Great Britain had “used every means most fitted to bring about,” such as “vacillation in council, harshness in language, feebleness in execution, disregard of American sympathies and affections,” also pointed out that “the truth of this memorable Declaration” was “warped” by “one singular defect,” namely, its exclusive and excessive arraignment of George the Third, “as a single and despotic tyrant,” much like Philip the Second to the people of the Netherlands.