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146 State of feeling in America. [1750- was examined before the House of Commons, declared emphatically that he knew the whole of the colonies, and that no one " drunk or sober " had ever talked of or contemplated independence. That there were as yet few, and those few not necessarily the wisest, who considered the ques- tion of separation, is probably true. On the other hand it was soon to be made clear that there was no desire for continued union strong enough to resist the pressure of a resolute minority favoured by irritating conditions. There was undoubtedly in Boston a small party who, if they had not even in their own minds formulated any scheme for independ- ence, were fully determined to pare down British control to a nullity, and to utilise every administrative error or difficulty to that end, and for whom the prospect of independence as a possible result of their strategy had no terrors. At their head was Samuel Adams, a man of humble social position, but of good education and great ability, per- sonally disinterested, but combining public spirit with unscrupulousness in his choice of methods in a fashion which recalls an Italian politician of the age of Machiavelli. Among his supporters was his namesake and distant kinsman, John Adams, a young lawyer gifted with great powers of thought and expression, egotistical yet capable of subordi- nating his egotism to the public good. There were also less worthy and less valuable members of the party such as James Warren, irresponsible young men with a passion for rhetoric and for abstract theories, and incapable of approaching political disputes with any approach to a judicial attitude. Finally there were men, such as Washington, who did not trouble themselves about political theories till such theories were forced upon them by some practical emergency, self-respecting Englishmen whose passion for liberty was largely based on a sense of personal dignity, and capable enough to be readily irritated by official blundering or corruption men, in short, not unlike those country gentlemen who cast in their lot with Pym and Hampden in the struggle against Charles I, not lightly carried away by gusts of partisanship, but unflinchingly staunch to a cause once embraced. Political parties in England were in a condition which made them singularly ill-fitted to cope with any disputes arising out of administrative difficulties. Party divisions no longer corresponded to real distinctions of faith and principle. Whatever we may think of Walpole's personal character or of the good effect of his commercial and administrative policy, we cannot doubt that his ascendancy, and the conduct of other party-leaders, except Pitt, in the following generation, coincided with, if it did not cause, a decay in the public life of England, a falling-away alike in principle and practical capacity. There were to be found, some- times coexisting in the same man, on the one hand a vague attachment to abstract views, on the other a cynical indifference to principle and a belief in what one may call hand-to-mouth methods in politics. Instances of the latter meet us at every turn in the administrative history