aversion. Like nearly every Frenchman of that day, he was thoroughly a monarchist; and he gained at once, and ever retained the good opinion of Louis XVI. Eleven years before, he had predicted that the conquest of Canada would hasten the independence of British America, and he was now from vantage-ground to watch his prophecy come true.

The philosophers of the day, like the king, wished the happiness of the people, and public opinion required that they should be represented in the cabinet. Maurepas complied. Malesherbes received the department of Paris and the police of the kingdom. The ministry of the marine was conferred on Turgot, whose name was as yet little known at Paris, and whose artlessness made him even a less dangerous rival than Vergennes. Coming forward in the purity of studious philosophy to take part in active life, he was well-informed, amiable, and of a taste the most delicate and sure; austere, yet holding it to be every man's business to solace those who suffer; wishing the accomplishment of good, not his own glory in doing it. For him the human race was one great family under a common Father; always, through calm and through "agitations," through good and through ill, through sorrow and through joy, on the march, though at "a slow step," toward a greater perfection. In five weeks he so won upon his sovereign's good-will that he was transferred to the ministry of finance. This was the wish of all the philosophers: of Alembert, Condorcet, Bailly, La Harpe, Marmontel, Thomas, Condillac, Morellet, and Voltaire. Nor of them alone. "Turgot," said Malesherbes, "has the heart of L'Hôpital and the head of Bacon." His candor, moreover, gave him clearsightedness and distinctness of purpose; his hopefulness promised to bear him serenely through the bitter warfare with selfish passions. At a moment when everybody confessed that reform was essential, it seemed a national benediction that a youthful king should intrust the task of amendment to a statesman who in a libertine age joined unquestioned probity to comprehensive intelligence and administrative experience. At his accession, the cry of joy broke from Voltaire: "A new world is about to bloom."

In France, the peasants were poor and ignorant, but, like all

Frenchmen, were free, and in the happiest provinces had been so for half a thousand years. In many parts of the kingdom they had retained their rights of property in the acres which they tilled. The defence of the country had passed from the king and his peers with their vassals to the king and his standing army. With the decay of the feudal system the nobles sought service in his pay; their vassals became a people.

The nobility, claiming for themselves exemptions from taxation which of old belonged to them in return for their defence of the kingdom, gave up none of their claims on the peasants who were crushed under a complicated system of irredeemable dues to roads and canals; to the bakehouse and the brewery of the lord of the manor; to his wine-press and his mill; to his tolls at the river, the market, or the fair; to ground-rents and quit-rents and fines on alienation. But there existed no harmonizing of the contrasts between privilege and poverty. The poor, though gay by temperament, lived sad and apart; bereft of intercourse with superior culture; never mirthful but in mockery of misery; not cared for in their want, nor solaced in hospitals, nor visited in prisons. The annual public expenditures largely exceeding the revenue, the nobility suffered the monarch to impose taxes on the unprivileged classes at his will. The imposts, which in two centuries had increased tenfold, fell almost exclusively on the lowly, who toiled and suffered; having no redress against those employed by the government; regarding the monarch with touching reverence and love, though they knew him mostly as the power that harried them; ruled as though joy were no fit companion for labor; as though want were the necessary goad to industry, and sorrow the only guarantee of quiet. They were the strength of the kingdom, the untiring producers of its wealth, the source of supply of its armies, the chief contributors to the royal revenue, and yet so forlorn was their condition that they cherished scarcely a dim vision of a happier futurity on earth.

Out of this sad state Turgot undertook to lift his country by peace, order, and economy. "It is to you personally," said he to Louis XVI., “to the man, honest, just, and good, rather than to the king, that I give myself up. You have confided

to me the happiness of your people, and the care of making you and your authority beloved; but I shall have to combat those who gain by abuses, the prejudices against all reform, the majority of the court, and every solicitor of favors. I shall sacrifice myself for the people; but I may incur even their hatred by the very measures I shall take to prevent their distress." "Have no fear," said the king, pressing the hand of his new comptroller-general; "I shall always support you."

The policy of Turgot implied a continuance of peace; yet the distrust of England, as an ever vigilant and unscrupulous rival which in 1755 had begun hostilities without notice and at the end of the war had stripped France of its best acquisitions in America and Hindostan, could not be hushed. French statesmen, therefore, bent the ear to catch the earliest surgings of American discontent; and they observed of the instructions from the convention of Virginia to its delegates in the continental congress: "They are the first which propose to restrain the act of navigation itself, and give pledges to resist force by force."

On Saturday, the sixth of August, Gage received an official copy of the act of parliament "for the better regulating the province of the Massachusetts Bay." It was, on the side of Great Britain, aggressive and revolutionary; it had been strenuously resisted and was utterly condemned by the Whig party of England. That the memory of their resistance might not perish, Rockingham and his friends had placed on the records of the house of lords their protest against the act. They condemned it "because," said they, "a definitive legal offence, by which a forfeiture of the charter is incurred, has not been clearly stated and fully proved; neither has notice of this adverse proceeding been given to the parties affected; neither have they been heard in their own defence; and because the governor and council are intrusted with powers with which the British constitution has not trusted his majesty and privy council, so that the lives and properties of the subjects are put into their hands without control."

The principle of the statute was the concentration of all executive power, including the courts of justice, in the hands of the royal governor. Without previous notice to Massachu

setts and without a hearing, it took away rights and liberties which the people had enjoyed from the foundation of the colony, except in the evil days of James II., and which had been renewed in the charter from William and Mary. That charter was coeval with the great English revolution, had been the organic law of the people of Massachusetts for more than eighty years, and was associated in their minds with every idea of English liberty and every sentiment of loyalty to the English crown. Under its provisions, the councillors, twenty-eight in number, had been annually chosen by a convention of the council for the former year and the assembly, subject only to the negative of the governor; henceforward they were to be not less than twelve nor more than thirty-six, were to derive their appointments and their emoluments from the king and to be removable at his pleasure. The governor received authority, without consulting his council, to appoint and to remove all judges of the inferior courts, justices of the peace, and all officers belonging to the council and the courts of justice. The governor and council might change the sheriffs as often as they pleased. In case of a vacancy, the governor was to appoint the chief justice and judges of the superior court, who were to hold their commissions during the pleasure of the king, and depend on his good-will for the amount and the payment of their salaries. The right of selecting juries was taken from the inhabitants and freeholders of the towns, and conferred on the sheriffs of the several counties within the province. This regulating act, moreover, uprooted the dearest institution of New England, whose people, from the first settlement of the country, had been accustomed in their town-meetings to transact all business that touched them most nearly as fathers, as freemen, and as Christians. There they adopted local taxes to keep up their free schools; there they regulated the municipal concerns of the year; there they chose their representatives and instructed them; and, as the limits of the parish and the town were usually the same, there most of them took measures for the settlement of ministers of the gospel in their congregations; there they were accustomed to express their sentiments on any subject connected with their interests, rights, liberties, or religion. The regulating act, sweeping away the

provincial law which had received the approval of William and Mary, permitted two meetings annually, in which town officers and representatives might be chosen, but no other matter be introduced; every other assembling of a town was forbidden, except by the written leave of the governor, and then only for business expressed in that leave. The king trampled under foot the customs, laws, and privileges of the people of Massachusetts. He was willing to spare them an explicit consent to the power of parliament in all cases whatever; but he required proof that Boston had compensated the East India company, that the tax on tea could be safely collected, and that the province would peacefully acquiesce in the change of its charter.

With the regulating act, Gage received copies of two other acts, designed to facilitate its enforcement. By one of them he was authorized to quarter his army in towns; by the other, to transfer to another colony or to Great Britain any persons informed against or indicted for crimes committed in supporting the revenue laws or suppressing riots.

The regulating act went into effect on the moment of its being received, and precipitated the choice between submission and resistance. Within a week, eleven of the mandamus councillors took the oath of office, and were followed in a few days by fourteen more. They were persuaded that the province could by no possibility hold out, and that the promise of assistance from other colonies was a delusion. No assembly existed in the province to remonstrate; and Gage might delay or wholly omit to send out writs for a new election. But a people who were trained to read and write; to discuss all political questions, privately and in public; to strive to exhibit in their lives the Christian system of ethics, the beauty of holiness, and the unselfish nature of virtue; to reason on the great ends of God in creation; to believe in their own immortality; and to venerate their ancestry as above all others pure, enlightened, and frec-could never forego the civil rights which were their most cherished inheritance.

"Being stationed by Providence in the front rank of the conflict," such was the letter of the committee of Boston to all the other towns in the province, "we trust we shall not be left by heaven to do anything derogatory to our common lib.