The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists. - Bernard Bailyn

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.