A comparison of the views of such men as Franklin, Hutchinson, and Pownall, expressed before they were forced into partisan relations to the impending conflict, help us in forming opinions respecting their conduct when affairs, no longer within the control of individuals, were swept onward by an uncontrollable impulse. Neither the colonies[155] nor the ministry approved of the proposed union; and when the new policy of raising a revenue was inaugurated the colonies were without defined integral relations to the mother country, and the government without administrative machinery for their regulation. The result was confusion. The press became heated, and an angry war of pamphlets ensued. At first the controversy was confined to the distinction between internal taxes and commercial regulations, but soon it involved the whole question of parliamentary power. This was elaborately and temperately discussed in the _Farmer's Letters_, by John Dickinson, but nowhere in America with more fulness (within the period covered by this chapter) than by Governor Hutchinson and the two Houses of the Massachusetts General Court, in messages and answers respectively, in January and February, 1773.[156] So far as the Revolution grew out of the Massachusetts controversy between the king's representatives and the General Court, its progress may be traced in the _Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, 1765 to 1775, and the Answers of the House of Representatives to the same_.[157] These authentic documents, with the _Journals of the House_ and the _Records of the Town of Boston_, may be referred to as showing the temper with which the parties treated each other, and the questions that were of paramount interest. The student will not find it easy to ascertain the facts which should make the history of the period. Contemporaneous accounts were generally drawn up with a partisan disregard of truth, and too much has been written subsequently in the same spirit. For the critical period of 1768, when the troops were sent over on account of the revenue riots, we have Bernard's _Letters_, which, though representing only one side, were written under a sense of official responsibility to the government. Though much complained of at the time as wanting in candor, their statements were evaded rather than controverted by the _Answer of the Major Part of the Council_, in a letter to the Earl of Hillsborough (April 15, 1769), as well as in _The Vindication of the Town of Boston_ (Oct. 18, 1769), drafted by Samuel Adams. For the entire period covered by this chapter, I find no narrative apparently more just, or opinions more candidly expressed, than in Ramsay's _History of the American Revolution_. Remote from the scene of the conflict, Ramsay shared the passions of neither party.