Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/104

78 The idea of a nation was slowly passing into the minds of the people, but many still believed that a recognition of the rights of the colonies could be achieved without a severance of political relations with the mother country. The great idea of a free and independent nation, as it rose in the minds of the people, left its traces in the journals of the day, and it was to those journals that the idea owed much.

Even before the independence of the country was thought of, prophecies as to the future greatness of America were being made in Europe, and these were bound, in time, to have their effect on the colonists. The spectacle of a nation in the process of formation was an attraction to the clear-visioned philosophers, such as Berkley in England and Turgot in France. A few farseeing patriots dreamed of a nation; Franklin, with continued vision, prophesied that the Mississippi Valley would become, in a comparatively few years, a populous and powerful country. Internal conditions, too, were adding to the leaven. About the middle of the eighteenth century a wave of democracy swept over the province of New York and spread to other provinces, in consequence of which suffrage was considerably extended.

Ignorant of occurrences on this side of the water, and unable to understand the temper and the new beliefs of the people who had once been loyal and unquestioning subjects, the British Government, by a series of acts calculated to check their democratic tendencies, irritated the colonists and finally roused them to the point of revolution. To awaken in the Americans a sense of indignation over their wrongs; to keep alive their resentment that they might, by cohesive action, break down the defense