Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/188

 15G Hutchinson' $ letters. [1773 At the same time it must be granted that the British government was not always forbearing or duly anxious to avoid making oppor- tunities of strife. It was an ill-chosen time for asserting the principle that the governor and the judges should receive their salaries direct from the Crown and not from the Assembly, though it might well be that in the existing state of feeling such a measure was temporarily required. It was an equally ill-chosen time for asserting and maintaining with special stringency the right of the Crown to a monopoly of ship-timber. Moreover, though Hutchinson was, according to his lights, as loyal to his native state as any of the so-called patriots, yet he had none of the arts by which administrative difficulties are smoothed over, and could never rise above an exact and technical interpretation of the system under which he had to act. An incident which took place in the year 177S, and in which Hutchinson was conspicuously concerned, was perhaps the most dis- creditable to the popular cause of all that took place during the struggle. Hutchinson and others had written letters to Whately, an English member of parliament, setting forth their views on the state of affairs at Boston. Some of the letters contained such querulous denun- ciations of the colonists as might be expected from officials with no wide political outlook. There was not in Hutchinson's own letters a single expression which went beyond what he had plainly and openly avowed in public. These letters came into Franklin's possession, and were forwarded by him to his friends in Massachusetts. The conduct of Franklin in obtaining possession of these letters was then and has been often since severely censured. The whole tenour of Franklin's life shows him to have been a man with no delicate sense of honour; and there are other incidents which prove that in what he believed to be a good cause he could be unscrupulous in his choice of means. But what is strange is that while Franklin has been freely condemned, little blame has ever been assigned to the far worse conduct of his allies in Massachusetts. Their use of the letters was shameless in its dishonesty and merciless in its cruelty. They were not at once made the subject of a formal indictment of the writers. Had this been done, Hutchinson would have had no difficulty in proving how innocuous was his own share in them. But they were privately circulated among a few persons ; vague rumours got about that the governor was at the head of a con- spiracy against the liberties of the colony ; and, by the time that the letters were formally laid before the Assembly, public opinion had been so warped and prejudiced that impartial inquiry was impossible. The result of the public production of the letters was a petition from the Assembly of Massachusetts to the Crown for the dismissal of Hutchinson and of Chief Justice Oliver. This petition was referred to a Committee of the Privy Council, and the petitioners were heard by counsel, while the solicitor-general, Wedderburn, watched the case on