Life of Count Rumford. 61 



Colonies themselves had contributed men and money 

 to this tedious and costly warfare, yet the exchequer 

 and the soldiery of England had furnished the forces 

 without which we should have been powerless. When 

 the Prime Minister, Grenville, in 1764, called the agents 

 of our Colonies together in England, he said to them 

 that the burden left by the French war was a debt of 

 seventy-three millions sterling. The protection we had 

 received, of course, excited a feeling of gratitude among 

 our people, and the more loyal among them thought 

 that their share in the cost of government was light, 

 .and that it was compensated. In 1763, Mr. James 

 Otis, afterwards to be known as the leading patriot, 

 in his address as Moderator of the first town meeting 

 held in Boston after the peace, said : " No other con- 

 stitution of civil government has ever yet appeared in 

 the world so admirably adapted to the preservation of 

 the great purposes of liberty and knowledge as that 

 of Great Britain. Every person in America is, of com- 

 mon right, by acts of Parliament and the laws of God, 

 entitled to all the essential privileges of Britons. The 

 true interests of Great Britain and her Colonies are 

 mutual ; and what God in his providence has united, 

 let no man dare attempt to pull asunder." Duties had 

 been reduced, and now the odious Stamp Act had been 

 repealed, and the colonists had assurance that their last 

 and fundamental grievance, of taxation without repre- 

 sentation, would be redressed. 



Our candor, therefore, in these days, must persuade 

 us to allow that there were reasons, or, at least, preju- 

 dices and apprehensions, which might lead honest and 

 right-hearted men, lovers and friends of their birth- 

 land, to oppose the rising spirit of independence as 



