Issues had been local and passions thus confined exploded all the more fiercely.

Franklin spoke of George III as drinking long draughts of American blood and of the British people as so depraved and barbarous as to be the wickedest nation upon earth, inspired by bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness.

To Washington George III was a tyrant, his ministers were scoundrels, and the British people were lost to every sense of virtue.

The evil of it is that, for a posterity which listened to no other comment on the issues of the Revolution, such utterances, instead of being understood as passing expressions of party bitterness, were taken as the calm judgments of men held in reverence and awe.

Posterity has agreed that there is nothing to be said for the coercing of the colonies so resolutely pressed by George III and his ministers.