Fortunately, this question can be answered without hesitation, and in a few words; and for these few words, an American writer of to-day, conscious of his own bias of nationality, will rightly prefer to cite such words as have been uttered upon the subject by the ablest English historians of our time. Upon their statements alone it must be concluded that George the Third ascended his throne with the fixed purpose of resuming to the crown many of those powers which, by the constitution of England, did not then belong to it, and that in this purpose, at least during the first twenty-five years of his reign, he substantially succeeded—himself determining what should be the policy of each administration, what opinions his ministers should advocate in Parliament, and what measures Parliament itself should adopt. Says Sir Erskine May: “The king desired to undertake personally the chief administration of public affairs, to direct the policy of his ministers, and himself to distribute the patronage of the crown. He was ambitious not only to reign, but to govern. Strong as were the ministers, the king was resolved to wrest all power from their hands, and to exercise it himself. But what was this in effect but to assert that the king should be his own minister?... The king’s tactics were fraught with danger, as well to the crown itself as to the constitutional liberties of the people.” Already prior to the year 1778, according to Lecky, the king had “laboriously built up” in England a “system of personal government”; and it was because he was unwilling to have this system disturbed that he then refused, “in defiance of the most earnest representations of his own minister and of the most eminent politicians of every party ... to send for the greatest of living statesmen at the moment when the empire appeared to be in the very agonies of dissolution.... Either Chatham or Rockingham should have insisted that the policy of the country should be directed by its responsible ministers and not dictated by an irresponsible sovereign.” This refusal of the king to pursue the course which was called for by the constitution, and which would have taken the control of the policy of the government out of his hands, was, according to the same great historian, an act “the most criminal in the whole reign of George the Third; ... as criminal as any of those acts which led Charles the First to the scaffold.” Even so early as the year 1768, according to John Richard Green,