After a rest the whole body marched back, harassed all the way by an incessant fire from cover, which they were for the most part unable to return. The British loss was sixty-five killed, about 157 wounded, and a few missing; the American casualties are stated as ninety-three in all. Not, unhappily, for the last time did our soldiers find that farmers and the like, who know their country, are accustomed to shoot, and understand the importance of taking cover, may be more than a match for brave and disciplined soldiers with no knowledge of war save the drill of a parade ground. It was evident that there was fighting stuff in the Americans, that they had some good marksmen, and that, undisciplined as they were, like the Boers of our own day, they knew how to use such advantages as they possessed. Thus was the first blood shed in this long quarrel. The revolution was begun. Sooner or later it must have come, though the date of its coming and the violent means by which it was accomplished were decided by individual action. The spirit which underlay it can be traced with growing distinctness since 1690; it was a spirit of independence, puritan in religion and republican in politics, impatient of control, self-assertive, and disposed to opposition. It was irritated by restraints on industry and commerce, and found opportunities for expression in a system which gave the colonies representative assemblies while it withheld rights of self-government. Great Britain has since then adopted a more enlightened colonial policy; yet the statesmen of past times are not to be condemned because they were men of their own days and lacked the experience of a future age. And it is to be remembered that England's colonial policy was then, as it is now, the most liberal in the world. American discontent existed before the reign of George III.; it was kept in check by the fear of French invasion. It was when that fear was removed that England began to enforce the restraints on commerce. This change in policy fell most heavily on the New England provinces, where whig tendencies were strongest, and specially on Massachusetts. A small and violent party in the province fanned the flame of discontent, and the attempts at taxation, which added to the grievances of the colonists, afforded a respectable cry to the fomenters of resistance. Their work was aided by the apprehension aroused in the minds of their fellow-countrymen, by the increase in the part played by the prerogative, and by the predominance of the tories in England. While men in other provinces, as Patrick Henry in Virginia, worked in sympathy with Samuel Adams and his associates, the revolution was at its outset engineered at Boston, and was immediately determined by the quarrel between Great Britain and Massachusetts. In the events which led to the revolution the British government appears to have shown a short-sighted insistence on legal rights and a contemptuous disregard