324 THE CONCILIATION PROPOSALS CHAP. 



among his enemies and his friends. But the sands were 

 running out. 



The administration of Lord North, who had become 

 prime minister in 1770, pursued its course taxation, 

 restriction, punitive measures, military occupation these 

 were just treatment according to the wisdom of those 

 days to apply to free-born Britons' in the colonies. The 

 affairs of America came often before parliament, and the 

 acts for closing Boston harbour, and breaking the charter 

 of the colony of Massachusetts, had been carried in the 

 House of Commons by large majorities, against the Whig 

 Opposition. A solid phalanx of votes supported the 

 king and the administration, although the means by 

 which many of these votes were secured were corrupt. 

 The monarch, to whom most of the colonists, and the 

 Friends on both sides of the Atlantic, still looked with 

 pathetic loyalty as to a " good and virtuous king," was 

 the mainspring of the ministerial policy. To do him 

 justice his motive was pious and consistent ; "I entirely 

 place my security," he writes to Lord North, " in the 

 protection of the Divine Disposer of all things." 1 But 

 his idea of kingship was one of personal autocratic rule ; 

 he was blind to the rights of a free democracy ; he was 

 grossly misinformed as to the real condition of America 

 by some of his own 'ministers the Earl of Sandwich, 

 secretary for the navy, looked on the troubles in New 

 England as merely a Brentford Riot on a larger scale ; 

 and to the very last phase of the struggle the " logic of 

 facts " made no impression upon his mind. 



Although however the official classes and country 

 gentlemen, with the support of Samuel Johnson amongst 

 others, and of many Scotsmen, upheld the repressive 

 policy of the government, the instincts of the people of 

 England, ill represented in parliament, were more just 

 and generous. Ignorance and apathy indeed were too 

 prevalent, yet the merchants, the dissenters and the 

 common people, with most Irishmen, were, so far as they 

 understood the case, on the side of the colonists. John 



1 Feb. 15, 1775. George III. Letters to Lord North, i. 229. 



