the Colonies which temporarily rallied the great majority of Englishmen to the support of the king and enabled him to build up a "King's Party" in Parliament that steadily carried the policies of his Minister, Lord North, who in turn took his instructions from the king. During the American war, which was the period of the Ministry of the subservient Lord North, the king was thus able to attain his object of subjecting the Parliament to the royal will. But it was precisely because the revolt of the Colonies had thrown all power into the hands of the king that the maintenance of this power depended upon the outcome of the Revolution. If the king could subjugate the Colonies, his system of government would be justified; if the Colonies won independence, such a disaster to the Empire would entirely and forever discredit his system of government. This, in fact, came to pass; the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown sealed the fate of Lord North's Ministry, and with the fall of Lord North the subjection of Parliament to the royal will was at an end.

II

The American Revolution was thus primarily a struggle between the Colonies and Great Britain over the question of self-government

-a struggle which was bound up with the question of royal as against parliamentary government in England, of popular government against a possible autocracy. But there was also another phase of the Revolution, and that was the struggle within the Colonies themselves between the little commercial and landowning aristocracies that had hitherto governed the Colonies and the "people," the unfranchised "humble folk," who now were coming to demand a measure of political equality. This struggle runs throughout the period of the controversy with Great Britain from 1765 to 1776; and while it was somewhat diminished during the period of the war itself, it broke out again with renewed force after the war was over. In fact, the American Revolution was not only a movement for national independence from Great Britain; it was also a movement for the democratization of American society and politics-a movement which has continued from that day to this and which is the central theme of our history.

In 1765 the right of voting in the American. Colonies for members of the colonial assemblies was in general restricted to those who possessed property, or met certain educational or religious tests. In most colonies a majority, and in all a considerable minority, of the adult

male citizens were disfranchised. Besides, the methods of naming candidates and of voting were such as to place a determining influence in the hands of a small coterie of wealthy families-the so-called "best families" of the province. These best families, together with the governors, who were mostly appointed from England and frequently from among these very families, made a very distinctive and powerful upper class a wellintrenched aristocracy which was the real governing force in each colony. In Virginia and South Carolina this class was composed of the great tidewater planters, whose extensive fields of tobacco, rice, and indigo were cultivated by means of negro slaves. In the Middle colonies there were not only the great landowners, whose estates were cultivated mainly by tenant labor, but also the wealthy commercial families of the cities of New York and Philadelphia. In New England there were fewer great estates and the small freeholders were more numerous; but there also a political and social aristocracy had come into existence-descendants of the old official and clerical leaders closely allied with families that had gained prominence in law or

commerce.

Sharply distinguished from these "gentlefolk," in dress and manners as well as in

social and political influence, was the great mass of the population-artisans and laborers, tenant and small freehold farmers. In the Middle and Southern colonies this distinction had come to have a territorial as well as a social and economic basis. In Virginia the poorer classes had moved "west" beyond the first falls of the rivers, into the piedmont or "up-country," where land was plentiful and cheap; while in Pennsylvania German and Scotch-Irish immigrants in great numbers had settled in the interior counties and from there had followed the valleys southward into the Virginia and Maryland upcountry and even as far south as the Carolinas. In this back-country the soil was not adapted to tobacco or rice. Here there were no great estates, no slaves, and few " servants, no houses with pretensions to architectural excellence, no leisured class with opportunities or inclinations for acquiring the manners or the tastes of the "gentleman." Here every man earned his bread by the sweat of his brow, manners were rude and primitive, institutions were simple, men lived close to the soil, equality was a fact, and freedom was limited only by the stubborn resistance of nature.

The conflict between the interests and ideals of these two classes and these two regions was already beginning when the controversy be

tween the British government and the Colonies began; and from the first the two issues became more or less identified. This was strikingly the case in Virginia in respect to the resolutions to be adopted in protest against the Stamp Act. In the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765 the old leaders of the tidewater region, who had always managed the colony, were opposed to adopting any resolutions at that time, since they had already, in 1764, drawn up a mild protest against the passage of the act. But there was present at this session the famous orator and tribune of the people, Patrick Henry, who had recently made a name for himself by exposing the shady actions of the treasurer, John Robinson, a prominent member of the aristocracy. This was equivalent to challenging the supremacy of the little group of tidewater planters, who had come to look upon the management of the colony as their vested duty. The episode had given Patrick Henry a great name in the province, and had got him a considerable following among the young men and small planters throughout the province, and especially in the back-country where he was born and raised and which he represented. In this session of 1765 Henry took the lead against the conservatives in introducing and passing a set of resolutions which

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