the British soldier. When anything went wrong Braddock blamed, not the ineffective work of his own men, but the supineness of Virginia. "He looks upon the country," Washington wrote in wrath, "I believe, as void of honour and honesty." The hour of trial came in the fight of July, 1755, when Braddock was defeated and killed on the march to the Ohio. Washington told his mother that in the fight the Virginian troops stood their ground and were nearly all killed but the boasted regulars "were struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive." In the anger and resentment of this comment is found the spirit which made Washington a champion of the colonial cause from the first hour of disagreement. That was a fatal day in March, 1765, when the British Parliament voted that it was just and necessary that a revenue be raised in America. Washington was uncompromising. After the tax on tea he derided "our lordly masters in Great Britain." No man, he said, should scruple for a moment to take up arms against the threatened tyranny. He and his neighbors of Fairfax County, Virginia, took the trouble to tell the world by formal resolution on July 18, 1774, that they were descended not from a conquered but from a conquering people, that they claimed full equality with the people of Great Britain, and like them would make their own laws and impose their own taxes. They were not democrats; they had no theories of equality; but as "gentlemen and men of fortune" they would show to others the right path in the crisis which had arisen. In this resolution spoke the proud spirit of Washington; and, as he brooded over what was happening, anger fortified his pride. Of the Tories in Boston, some of them highly educated men, who with sorrow were walking in what was to them the hard path of duty, Washington could say later that "there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures."