But, whatever view we may take as to that, we cannot but see that the English settlers in America could never, with even tolerable safety, have declared themselves independent of the British Government, if they had still had the French menace hanging over them. They could not possibly have dispensed with the support of the British army and navy. But after the defeat of the French in Canada they were free to assert themselves.
George III
And again whatever be our opinion about this great splitting up into two branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock, we of England are painfully obliged to realise that it was England's fault. It came about owing to the obstinacy and the despotic ideas of that king of the Hanoverian Royal family, George III., who was on the throne of Great Britain. He even tried his hardest, but in vain, to suppress the newspapers which dared to comment on matters of public interest at home. As a foreigner, and very ignorant of the temper of the people, he was in some degree to be excused. He could scarcely be expected to know better than he did.
There were those about him whom we might have expected to know better—his Prime Ministers, and notably Lord Grenville and Lord North. But Lord Grenville was as proud and arrogant as the king himself, and Lord North was not at all a clever man, and, besides, was the absolute servant of his king, not daring to assert his voice against his master's, as Pitt, who had been Prime Minister a little while before, had dared often and long.
We have to realise that the actual government was very much in the hands of the king at this date. Then, as now, it was nominally the Parliament that governed. The Cabinet, in fact, does most of the business to-day. Under George III. it was George III. that governed, because the Parliament was full of "the king's friends," as they were called—members whom affection or bribery or some other form of interest influenced so that they could be relied on to support any measures which the king wished to be carried.
The population and the wealth of the British colonies in America had grown very rapidly. At the beginning of George III.'s reign the colonists are said to have numbered nearly a million and a half, which was then just about a fourth of the population of the mother country. And there was already half a million of slaves in the South.
The slaves were already creating a difference between the South and the North, or, shall we say, were emphasising and widening the difference created by the different type of colonist by which the two districts were populated. For Virginia and the other southern States had been occupied largely by emigrants from the West of England and by aristocratic families, and with the slaves to work for them they tended to divide up the country into large estates; whereas in the North, whither the emigrants had come from a lower social stratum at home, and where they had no slaves to work for them, the holdings were small.
In religion the Virginians were mainly of the Established English Church. In Maryland, the inhabitants were chiefly Roman Catholic. In New England, Puritans were in a large majority; and in Pennsylvania, the State of William Penn, the people were largely Quakers.
It was for the sake of religion that most of them, or their forbears, had left their native land. And just because the religions were so many and various, it was impossible that there could be any established Church among them in the land of their adoption. Men were free to serve God according to the dictates of their consciences.