George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[270] America. Did the increase of population lead the

chap. XI.} 1757.

legislatures to enlarge the representative body? The right to do so was denied, and representation was held to be a privilege conceded by the king as a boon, and limited by his will. Did the British commander believe that the French colonies through the neutral islands derived provisions from the continent? By his own authority he proclaimed an embargo in every American port. Did South Carolina, by its Assembly, institute an artillery company? Lyttleton interposed his veto, for there should be no company formed but by the regal commission. By another act, the same Assembly made provision for quartering soldiers, introducing into the law the declaratory clause, that ‘no soldier should ever be billeted among them.’ This, also, Lyttleton negatived; and but for the conciliatory good temper of Bouquet, who commanded at Charleston, the province would have been inflamed by the peremptory order which came from Loudoun to grant billets under the act of parliament.

Thus did the government of the English aristocracy paralyze the immense energies of the British empire. In the North, Russia had been evoked from the steppes of Asia to be the arbiter of Germany. In the Mediterranean Sea, Minorca was lost; for Hanover, Cumberland had acceded to a shameful treaty of neutrality; in America, England had been driven from the valley of the Mississippi and the whole basin of the St. Lawrence with its tributary lakes and rivers.

And yet sentence had been passed upon the monarchy of feudalism. The enthusiast Swedenborg had announced that its day of judgment was come. The English aristocracy, being defeated, summoned to