colonies within two years after the Peace of Paris, and these were the fruits of the new sense of security which British triumphs in Canada had given to the colonists. [11] John W. Burgess, "Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law," 67-68, also 65-69. This is a brief statement and a fair one of the principal arguments of the Loyalists. Certainly the position taken by them was a very strong one. A learned American writer upon law, one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, in referring to the decision of Chief Justice Hutchinson sustaining the legality of the writs of assistance, gave this opinion: "A careful examination of the question compels the conclusion that there was at least reasonable ground for holding, as a matter of mere law, that the British parliament had power to bind the colonies."[12] This view has been sustained by the highest English authorities upon British constitutional law, from the time of Lord Mansfield to the present. "As a matter of abstract right," says Sir Vernon Harcourt, "the mother country has never parted with the claim of ultimate supreme authority for the imperial legislature. If it did so, it would dissolve the imperial tie, and convert the colonies into foreign and independent states." It is now apparent that those Americans who failed in their honest and sacrificial championship of measures that would have given us political reform and political safety, but without civil war, and without an angry disruption of the English-speaking race can justly be regarded as having been, either in doctrine or in purpose, or in act, an unpatriotic party, and yet even at the present time it is by no means easy for Americans, if they be descended from men who fought in behalf of the Revolution, to take a disinterested attitude, that is an historical one towards those Americans who thought and fought against the Revolution. [12] Horace Gray, Quincy's Mass. Reports, 1761-62, Appendix I., page 540. No candid historian, however, now contends that the government of England had done anything prior to the commencement of the Revolutionary War that justified a Declaration of Independence; for, as previously stated, the amount of taxes required by Parliament was moderate, the money was needed for a proper purpose, and it seemed there was no other way of obtaining it.