without committing his country, or, with due caution to his
correspondent, even himself; but for effective public and
official protest the colonial assemblies were the proper
channels, and very expert they were in the business, after having
for half a century and more devoted themselves with singleness of
purpose to the guardianship of colonial liberties. Until now,
liberties had been chiefly threatened by the insidious designs of
colonial governors, who were for the most part appointed by the
Crown and very likely therefore to be infected with the spirit of
prerogative than which nothing could be more dangerous, as
everyone must know who recalled the great events of the last
century. With those great events, the eminent men who directed
the colonial assemblies--heads or scions or proteges of the best
families in America, men of wealth and not without reading--were
entirely familiar; they knew as well as any man that the
liberties of Englishmen had been vindicated against royal
prerogative only by depriving one king of his head and another of
his crown; and they needed no instruction in the significance of
the "glorious revolution," the high justification of which was to
be found in the political gospel of John Locke, whose book they
had commonly bought and conveniently placed on their library
shelves.

More often than not, it is true, colonial governors were but
ordinary Englishmen with neither the instinct nor the capacity
for tyranny, intent mainly upon getting their salaries paid and
laying by a competence against the day when they might return to
England. But if they were not kings, at least they had certain
royal characteristics; and a certain flavor of despotism,
clinging as it were to their official robes and reviving in