CHAPTER V

THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF AMERICA

"By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial Empire that circled the whole globe."

EDMUND BURKE on American Taxation, April 19, 1774

INCE Edmund Burke no English writer of the first

ST

rank, with two brilliant exceptions, W. H. Lecky

and Sir George Trevelyan, has studied the American side of the American Revolution. The architects who designed and built the Republic of the West; the master mariners who steered it through the storms and tempests of its infancy into unmolested security, have not attracted the attention of our biographers and historians. Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, Morley, Bryce, and other masters of the craft, left that most momentous chapter of American history unadorned and almost untouched. Even the prosaic industry of Gardiner and the Archivists has abandoned these fields to American ploughmen. One English writer indeed in recent times threw up a cloud of glittering dust around the career of Alexander Hamilton. But this overcoloured portrait, painted in the heyday of commercial Imperialism by a disciple of Mr. Chamberlain, belongs to fiction rather than to history.

But if English men of letters have neglected the great age of American statesmanship, American authors have told and retold the story, so inglorious to the old Mon

archy, so glorious to the new Republic; so bitter to tyranny, so sweet to liberty. In these histories and biographies, and especially in some of the multitudinous text books prepared for the edification of American schools and Universities, a false note is too often struck. Too often the policy pursued by George the Third, Townshend, and Lord North towards the American Colonies is treated as a national policy representing the aims and inclinations of the English people. Englishmen have long ago acknowledged and repented the misdeeds of George the Third and his Ministers; but a vast majority of them at the time were unconsulted and had no vote or voice. Fifty years after a peace which acknowledged the independence of their American colonies they made an orderly revolution at home and threw off the yoke of oppression. They began to reform their parliament, their municipal government, their poor laws, their civil service, and their system of Colonial administration. They learned not only in the hard school of war and suffering, but also in the philosophic pages of Adam Smith and Bentham, the virtues of freedom and self-government. Unhappily the seeds of mischief, sown in a moment of corruption and imperial pride, brought forth for generations many harvests of ill will in America towards the English people, who were not at all responsible for the war and had no means of preventing it. In 1774 seven hundred voters in England and Wales elected 56 members of parliament, and 11,000 elected 254. Cornwall returned four times as many members as London and Middlesex. Manchester and many other large towns were totally unrepresented. In Scotland the elections were a farce. All the machinery of government was controlled either by the king and his ministers, or by the landed aristocracy and country gentlemen. Only

in a handful of English boroughs and counties were there enough voters to secure the occasional election of a popular candidate.

In spite of the lies disseminated by a venal press, ministerial measures for the conciliation of America would have won general approval. The only complaint we can fairly level against the English people in 1774 and 1775 is that, uneducated and systematically misinformed, without arms, politically powerless, they were unripe for revolution. If the unenfranchised labourers and mechanics of Britain had neither strength nor spirit to fight for their own liberties, they at least refused to serve against those of America. They could not put down the Press gang, or prevent their rulers from hiring German mercenaries. George the Third dragged his ministers along the path of coercion not to please the people but to please himself. In February, 1775, Lord Camden thus summed up public opinion in England: "The landed interest is almost altogether anti-American, though the common people hold the war in abhorrence and the merchants and tradesmen for obvious reasons are likewise against it." Eighteen months earlier Benjamin Franklin, then agent of Massachusetts in London, had told Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, that "America had many friends and well wishers" in England: "there seems to be, even among the country gentlemen, a growing sense of our importance, a disapprobation of the harsh measures with which we have been treated, and a wish that some means might be found of peaceful reconciliation." Had there been two Franklins, one to remain in London, the other to take the place of Samuel Adams in Boston, it is just possible that, in spite of George the Third, war and separation would have been postponed. In that, as in