destined to be confirmed by the facts.

We have now to deal with the outbreak of a contest which was, according
to the greatest of the English statesmen of the period, "a most
accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical
war." No American writer ever employed to describe it a combination of
adjectives so vigorous as those brought together by the elder Pitt,
afterwards Lord Chatham. The rights for which Americans fought seemed to
him to be the common rights of Englishmen, and many Englishmen thought
the same.

On the other hand, we are now able to do justice to those American
Loyalists who honestly believed that the attempt at independence was a
mad one, and who sacrificed all they had rather than rebel against their
King. Massachusettensis, the well-known Tory pamphleteer, wrote that the
annals of the world had not been deformed with a single instance of so
unnatural, so causeless, so wanton, so wicked a rebellion.

These strong epithets used on both sides show how strangely opinions
were divided as to the rebellion and its causes. Some of the first
statesmen of England defended the colonists, and some of the best known
men in the colonies defended England.

The City of Boston at this time had a population of about seventeen
thousand, as compared with some half a million to-day. In its garrison
there were three thousand British troops, and the laws of Parliament
were enforced rigidly. The city suffered temporary commercial death in
consequence, and there were the most vigorous efforts made to prevent an
open outbreak of hostilities. In January, 1775, a conflict was barely
averted at Marshfield, and in the following month the situation was so