first in private confidence, steadily strengthening into the frankest and boldest avowal—the conviction that the issue opened between the colonies and the mother country logically, necessarily, and inevitably must result in a complete severance of the tie between them. Even at that stage of his earliest insight into the superficial aspect of the controversy, when he is quoted as if hypocritically saying one thing while he intended another, it will be observed that his strong professions of loyalty are qualified by parenthetical suggestions of a possible alternative. Thus, in the Address which he wrote for the Massachusetts Assembly, in 1768, to the Lords of the Treasury, his explicit professions of loyalty for his constituents close with the caveat that this loyalty will conform itself to acquiescence so far as "consists with the fundamental rules of the Constitution."[684] Of course, as the oppressive measures of government exasperated the patriots, they were not only led on to discern the full alternative before them, but were unreserved in their expressions of a willingness to meet it, at whatever cost. Still, however, what seemed like hesitation in the boldest was simply a waiting for the slow and timid to summon resolution for decisive action. Of the single measures in Congress preceding the Declaration of Independence, the most farcical and the most likely to be regarded as hypocritical was the second petition to the king, which his majesty spurned. His ministers had to compare with its adulatory insincerities some intercepted letters of John Adams, written nearly at the same time, stinging with defiance and treason. But John Adams well described this petition to the king as "Dickinson's Letter." Dickinson himself is the most conspicuous and true-hearted of the class of men who to the last shrunk from the severance of the tie to the mother country. Yet he was to be the one whose casting vote, by a substitute, was to ratify the great Declaration. There may have been weakness in his urgency that that petition should proffer a final hope of amity, but it was the prompting of thorough manliness and honesty. As we have seen, it was the royal scorn of that petition, backed by a wilful personal espousal of responsibility, which made the king the real prompter of the Declaration of Independence.[685] Leaving out of view all obligations of the colonies to the mother country, there was still quite another class of very reasonable apprehensions which had a vast influence over the halting minds. What would be the relations of the severed and possibly contentious colonies to each other, with all their separate interests, rivalries, and jealousies? Might not anarchy and civil war make them rue the day when, in rejecting the tempered severity of the rule of a lawful monarch, they had forfeited the privilege of having an arbiter and a common friend?