Even in England thousands of hearts warmed to the American cause. In Parliament, Charles James Fox, Earl Chatham, Edmund Burke, the virtuous Lord Camden, and others; out of it, David Hume the historian, Edward Gibbon, whose studies of the rise as well as the fall of Rome had led him down into the crypt of history, and countless able, learned, and good, others as true to state as to individual freedom, gave vent and weighty shape to the well-considered convictions of the injustice of the attempt to compel the Colonies to submit to impositions unassented to by themselves. But while in England there were advocates of colonial freedom, in the Colonies there were friends of Parliamentary oppression. These last were infiltrated more or less through all the United settlements; but they gathered in notable volume in and about the then considerable village of New York,—numbering about 26,000 inhabitants,—where all the vigilant zeal of Alexander Hamilton, an ardent, eloquent young lawyer, recently arrived from his native West Indies, the equally vigorous but cooler patriotism of John Jay, and the alert wisdom of other Sons of Liberty were needed, to make head against the Tory current whose momentum and velocity, quickened by wealth, social position, and official experience, swept with force and volumed power through the island city. Rude indeed was the shock given to the Manhattan loyalists by the overthrow in the Bowling Green of the leaden statue of George III., and the conversion of its characteristically heavy metal into lively Continental bullets. The popular repeal of this loyal statue was soon followed in Congress by the repeal of more important representatives of royalty,—leaden-typed statutes. The year 1777 opened with the battle of Princeton, fought under the leadership of Washington and Cornwallis, whereby two hundred English and Germans were put under sodded trenches, to furnish in after times, in addition to their use in well-rounded school-boys’ periods, a special resort for the students of Nassau Hall, accompanied by such persuadable female companions—Dutch, American, English, or German—as might relish history studied under the advantageous lights of a pair of admiring eyes.