And the country squires wanted no change. They thought the British Government the best in the world, and were determined to defend their privileges. It never occurred to them that duty required that they should try to alleviate the miseries of the poor people; they were too intent on enjoying their great manor houses, their formal gardens, their stately dinners, their fox hunts, to heed the voices which were pleading for social and political reform.[37]
But it would be a mistake to assume that Great Britain had become static in intellectual, social, and institutional matters. On the contrary, the first seven decades of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous activity. It was the period of Richardson and Fielding in literature, of the great religious revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, of renewed interest in Shakespeare, of the birth of industrial Britain, of the bold defiance of authority by John Wilkes. Had Parliament truly reflected the spirit of the age, had it not revered the old system of government as the best attainable by man, it would have attuned itself to these changes.
If the Commons were out of step with the march of events in Great Britain, they were far more so with developments in the colonies. They knew nothing of the influence of the vast natural resources and the limited supply of labor in lifting the level of the common man and giving him a sense of self-respect, nothing of the democratizing power of the frontier. And what little they saw they disliked. No doubt some would have applauded Samuel Johnson when he said of the Americans: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging."
With such irreconcilable differences between the ruling group in Great Britain and the people of the colonies the conflict was inevitable. The King, the Privy Council, the Board of Trade, the Commons construed the many instances of colonial disobedience as attacks on the foundations of the established order, as revolutionary innovations. To Americans they seemed no more than the assertion of rights inherent in all free men. And though many of their claims had no precedent in English experience, they began to speak of them as ancient and necessary for the existence of representative government.