ecclesiastical disability, it also followed that both the attainment and continuance of political rights were, to all practical purposes, in the hands of ecclesiastical rulers." By the provincial charter all this was abolished. The new government had exclusively for its end "the things about which the civil power is usually conversant; goods, lands, honors, the liberties and peace of the outward man." The influence of the clergy, at all times very great in New England, was thus separated from the English government, and they were at once identified in sympathy, hopes, and prospects, with the people of the colony. As I shall have occasion hereafter to say, this influence was essential to the success of the Revolution. It is not likely that any form of government which Great Britain could have established, especially if it excluded our people from its control, could have maintained the union twenty-five years longer than the relation actually existed. The future in some particulars was as full of hope then to them as it is now to us. Many of their anticipations were so sanguine that the reality has not been equal to them. In 1763 an estimate was made that the population of New England in 1835 would be 4,000,000. From this it is apparent that they had already tasted prosperity and had come to understand the advantages of our country, especially in the character of its population, over the old countries of Europe. The British Ministry did not discover the means by which the colonies were to be retained, if retained at all. Our ancestors had little respect for hereditary privileges and the pretensions of birth. They were for the most part believers in the equality of the human race; and, moreover, in their municipal governments, they had learned the safety and power of universal suffrage. A few men only in England had an accurate idea of American principles, or the difficulty of holding in unwilling embrace three million people. Among the representatives of this small class were the elder Pitt, Burke, and Wilkes. Pitt declared that "three million people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of ourselves."