Hamilton referred only to legal development since he was defending a client in a court of law; but from his premise a political conclusion could be drawn, namely, that government might not necessarily be directly transferable either: if the Hanoverian monarchy, however successful in Britain, could not rule satisfactorily the Colonial democracy that was developing on this side of the Atlantic, then perhaps something else should be put in its place. In Hamilton’s time the crown itself was not yet suspect; it remained inviolate, the _sanctum sanctorum_ of allegiance and veneration, when its representatives over here were attacked with unmitigated animosity. Hamilton himself remarked that the king differed from his officials in kind rather than merely in degree. Once, however, the authority of the king had been challenged, then Hamilton’s appeal from British precedent to Colonial experience became very much to the point. His efforts in behalf of liberty for New York helped pave the way for liberty for America, the rebels of the 1770’s drawing from his legal premise the political conclusion that lay implicit in it. He enabled them to argue cogently that independence was not a scandalous novelty but a natural issue of the American situation in the face of an authority three thousand miles away. The men of the Revolution were well aware of their indebtedness. Gouverneur Morris spoke for them all when he delivered his famous judgment that “The trial of Zenger in 1735 was the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.” Britain herself did not go unaffected by what had happened in the City Hall of her New York Colony. As far as it concerned freedom of the press, the Zenger case fell into place in a transition that had long been developing in the classical home of libertarian ideas. The account of the trial was reprinted there, and cited as an ideal of what British journalists were striving for. In 1738 a London correspondent wrote to Benjamin Franklin’s _Pennsylvania Gazette_ to say that Andrew Hamilton’s address to the jury was causing something of a furor in the coffeehouses where the gentry and the intelligentsia met, as well as among the professional lawyers. The correspondent quoted one leader of the British bar as saying of Hamilton’s argument, “If it is not law, it is better than law, it ought to be law, and will always be law wherever justice prevails.”