It is doubtful, however, whether any policy could have rendered permanent the subjection of the colonies, even such a nominal subjection as that in which they had always been held. In looking for the causes of the Revolution, it is well to discriminate between those which were general in their effects and those which were local. The latter had been more actively operative and of longer existence in Massachusetts, where the Revolution began, than in any other colony. These were interwoven with the civil and ecclesiastical history of her people, which made them peculiarly apprehensive in respect to threatened invasion of rights which they had secured only by expatriation. Although the peculiar experience of Massachusetts did not cause the Revolution, it is doubtful whether, except for that experience, the Revolution would have occurred for some years. Nor was resistance to the Anglican ecclesiastical pretensions, connected as they were with the most odious features of the prerogative, confined to New England, but made itself felt in New York and in Virginia.[136] The general causes were the ever present and ever active strife between parties,—the liberals and the conservatives,—arising from a diversity of political ideas, and intensified by ambition, interest, and personal animosities. But the proximate causes of the Revolution will be found in that change of policy which led the ministry, at the close of a war that had strained the colonies to the utmost, to enforce the navigation laws, to lay taxes, to invoke the prerogative, and finally to overthrow the government of Massachusetts, and thus to threaten the autonomy of the people under the provincial constitutions. CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION. THE change in British colonial policy contemplated by the ministry during the progress of the French War, and entered upon between 1763 and 1774, developed those causes of dissatisfaction which had been intermittently operative for more than a century, and finally led to war in 1775. In the preceding chapter I have omitted, or passed lightly over, many incidents of the period which had no particular political significance, and dwelt more at length on the principles and causes which led to the Revolution. I shall pursue the same course in this essay.