The Stamp Act and the Tea Duty were no more than the last drops in a full cup.

1

The temperament and physical energy of the men who settled the Northern Colonies, as well as the spur of necessity from a steadily increasing population, made them no longer content to remain simply tillers of the soil, but drove them into manufacturing, and it was the repressive policy of England which aroused their resentment. To enable them to manufacture profitably they needed capital, and it was to England they must look for money to carry on their ventures. English capitalists and merchants were eager to finance plantations and extend liberal credit to the producers of colonial raw materials, but they would furnish no money to create a rival to their own profitable monopoly, and they further fortified themselves, as we have seen, by the passage of discriminatory legislation.2 Yet, despite obstacles, manufacturing increased and added to the wealth of the colonies.

1 Morley: Edmund Burke, p. 152.

2 "The commercial code was so stern and cruel, that an American merchant was compelled to evade a law of the realm, in order to give a sick neighbor an orange or cordial of European origin, or else obtain them legally, loaded with the time, risk, and expense of a voyage from the place of growth or manufacture to England, and thence to his own warehouse. An American shipowner or shipmaster, when wrecked on the coast of Ireland, was not allowed to unlade his cargo on the shore where his vessel was stranded, but was required to send his merchandise to England, when, if originally destined for, or wanted in, the Irish market, an English vessel might carry it thither." — Sabine: Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, vol. 1, p. 11.

CHAPTER X

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

BURKE, in that famous Speech on Conciliation with America, which every American schoolboy knows (by title) and no American reads, told the House of Commons that "in this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth." He explains the causes that have produced this spirit. They are liberty-loving because they are the descendants of Englishmen, and England "is a nation, which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles."

....

In England, Burke pointed out, the great conquests for freedom were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxation. "The colonies draw from you, as with their lifeblood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing." Religion and education were also contributing causes to the spirit of liberty, and "the last cause of this disobedient spirit" was not merely moral but "laid deep in the natural constitution of things." Three thousand miles of ocean separated the mothercountry from her colonies. "No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. . From all these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up. It has grown with the growth of the people in your colonies, and increased with the increase of their wealth; a spirit, that unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England, which, however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of liberty, much less with theirs, has kindled this flame that is ready to consume us."1

Words of wisdom to fall on deaf ears. Burke saw that the colonies had grown to miniature states, so did Walpole and Pitt and a few others, but these few stood almost alone, clear-eyed while the men

1 Burke: Speech on Conciliation with America, Works, vol. 1, pp. 464–469, passim.

around them were blinded by their conceit to the temper of their kinsmen across the Atlantic. The colonies had not only become miniature states, but the men who governed them had developed qualities of statesmanship; they had become practiced men of affairs, jealous of control, conscious of their power, fortified by their own strength, impatient of the suggestion that they were incapable of managing their own concerns. But it must never be forgotten that while the Americans won their independence at Yorktown, it was in London itself that no mean battle was fought. It has only been in recent years that American historians have realized 1 that the opposition of the Whigs, the sonorous eloquence of Burke, the mordant sarcasm of Fox, the defiant championship of Pitt — that notable declaration: "I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest" not only encouraged the colonists in their resistance, but hampered the Government. Had England been united, had the best brains of England acquiesced in the policy of the coercion of

1 Cf. Fiske: The Critical Period of American History, p. 1 et seq. “What would have been the result of our recent war for the Union if Charles Sumner and Thad Stevens and John A. Andrew had espoused in Congress and in the public forum the cause of the South, as on the floor of Parliament Chatham and Hampden and Fox and Burke and other English leaders were thundering for the cause of America?". John D. Long, oration delivered at Springfield, Massachusetts, July 4, 1909, Springfield Republican, July 5, 1909. . 2 Chatham's Correspondence, vol. 11, p. 369.

the American colonies, we shall not say that Yorktown would not have been won, but independence would have been purchased at a heavier cost.1

Nor again must it be forgotten that what had been going on in America was symptomatic of a world-wide movement; that in England there was an intellectual revolt against the control of Parliament by the King; that there was an intense desire to make Parliament really representative instead of seeing it packed to carry out the King's pleasure. Burke voiced the new thought in England as John Dickinson did in America; John Wilkes was its victim there as Samuel Adams would have been in the colonies had the hand of the King stretched so far; "Junius" was its pamphleteer in London and the "Pennsylvania Farmer" in Philadelphia. The old spirit of resistance was revived; the old feeling was again springing into life that men must govern themselves and not permit themselves to be governed by a ministry responsible to no one except a sovereign's arbitrary will. As always happens, a

1 "The difficulty of procuring voluntary recruits for the army and navy seems to show that, if the bulk of the poorer population of the country did not actually sympathize with the Americans, a war with a people of their own race and language had at least no popularity among them." - Lecky: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. III, p. 540.

"I am grieved to observe," Lord Camden wrote, "that the landed interest is almost altogether anti-American; though the common people hold the word in abhorrence, and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it." Chatham's Correspondence, vol. iv, p. 401.

Chatham, faithful to his principles, compelled his oldest son to resign from the army rather than see him fight his kinsmen; and Lord Effingham, for the same reason, threw up his commission.