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234 Causes of American success. [i780-2 To this league France, Spain, and Holland soon afterwards acceded. In September, 1780, an English frigate captured an American packet. On board was Henry Somers, a leading American who had not long before been President of Congress, and who was now on his way to the Hague on a diplomatic mission. His papers showed that for two years there had been negotiations between Holland and the United States. Sir Joseph Yorke, the British Minister at the Hague, was instructed to demand from the Dutch government an explicit disclaimer of hostile intentions. This he did with a degree of harshness which made a rupture inevitable. The required assurance was refused; Yorke was summoned home; the Dutch Minister in London was dismissed. On the 10th of December, 1780, Holland joined the Armed Neutrality and four days later England declared war on Holland. That Great Britain found it impossible to overcome resistance in America, in the face of Europe combined against her in active or passive hostility, is not perhaps surprising. Finally, apart from all these military difficulties, one may doubt whether, even if the British arms had been successful, there were not political hindrances to effective and permanent control of the colonies more insuperable still. For a while at least government would have had to take the form of armed occupation, and it is not likely that armed occupation would ever have passed into peaceful civil administra- tion, loyally accepted by the colonists. Almost from the hour of their foundation the colonies had been developing not only political methods but political ideals different from those of the mother-country. The material interests which bound them to Great Britain were real, but they were too indirect and remote to appeal readily to ordinary men. The tie of sentiment was actually weakened by the necessary closeness of administrative relations. The vague reverence of the medieval ecclesiastic for the grandeur of Rome failed as he was brought face to face with the intrigues and corruptions of the papal Court. Not dissimilar were the feelings of the colonist who like Franklin was driven to contrast the vast responsibilities of the British government with the sordid realities of parliamentary corruption and ministerial intrigue.