the old country. As the eminent philosophical historian, M.
Guizat, has said, "It might be considered the history of England
herself." The resemblance is the more striking when we remember
that the majority of the American Colonies and the more important
of them were founded or increased the most rapidly at the very
epoch when England was preparing to sustain, and in part already
sustaining, those fierce conflicts against the pretensions of
absolute power which were to obtain for her the honor of giving
to the world the first example of a great nation free and well
governed.

How similarly the state of affairs appeared, in the eyes of those
who were not blinded by self-interest, on both sides of the
Atlantic, is shown by the following extracts from Burke and Otis.

In 1770 Burke thus described the social and political conditions
both at home and in the Colonies: "That the government is at
once dreaded and contemned; that the laws are despoiled of all
their respected and salutary terrors; that their inaction is a
subject of ridicule and their enforcement of abhorrence; that
rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of
the world, have lost their reverence and effect; that our foreign
politics are as much deranged as our domestic economy; that our
dependencies are slackened in their affection and loosened from
their obedience; that we know neither how to yield nor how to
enforce; that hardly anything above or below, abroad or at home,
is sound and entire; but that disconnection and confusion, in
office, in parties, in families, in parliament, in the nation,
prevail beyond the disorders of any former time, these are facts
universally admitted and lamented."