I The Revolution THAT there were two sides to the controversy between the colonies and the mother country is now generally recognized, although we as Americans still have difficulty in doing full justice to the arguments in behalf of Great Britain. Mr. Lecky, in his able and dispassionate review of these differences, says: "England was originally quite right in her contention that it was the duty of the colonists to contribute something to the support of the army which defended the unity of the Empire. She was quite right in her belief that in some of the colonial constitutions the executive was far too feeble, that the line which divided liberty from anarchy was often passed, and that the result was profoundly and permanently injurious to the American character. She was also, I think, quite right in ascribing a great part of the resistance of America to the disposition, so common and so natural in dependencies, to shrink as much as possible from any expense that could possibly be thrown on the mother country, and in forming a very low estimate of those ambitious lawyers, newspaper writers, preachers, and pamphleteers who, in New England at least, were laboring with untiring assiduity to win popular applause by sowing dissension between England and her colonies. But the Americans were only too well justified in asserting that the suppression of several of their industries and the monopoly by England of some of the chief branches of 1 their trade, if they did not benefit the mother country, at least imposed sacrifices on her colonies fully equivalent to a considerable tax. They were also quite justified in contending that the power of taxation was essential to the importance of their Assemblies, and that an extreme jealousy of any encroachment on this prerogative was in perfect accordance with the traditions of English liberty. They had before their eyes the hereditary revenue, the scandalous pension list, the monstrous abuses of patronage, in Ireland, and they were quite resolved not to suffer similar abuses in America. The judges only held their seats during the royal pleasure. Ministerial patronage in the colonies, as elsewhere, was often grossly corrupt, and in the eyes of the colonists the annual grant was the one efficient control upon maladministration." (History of England in the Eighteenth Century, IV, p. 111.) Moreover, important differences existed between the views of the English constitution which prevailed at home and in the colonies. The English government held the present-day view, that Parliament possesses an absolute legal supremacy over all British subjects; that throughout the whole of the Empire its statutes are law; and that no person or court anywhere has power to nullify those statutes on the ground of unconstitutionality or otherwise. (Dicey, Law of the Constitution, ch. i.) The members of the House of Commons were not regarded as local representatives, but as individually and collectively representing every person owing allegiance to the king-every blade of grass, every clod of earth. Consequently, the colonies were thought to be represented quite as much as the great manufacturing towns of Leeds, Birmingham, and the like, which until 1882 elected no separate representatives to Parliament. The American colonists, on the other hand, held to an older idea, which had been advanced in the controversy between Crown and Parliament in the seventeenth century and then laid aside, namely, that there were certain fundamental laws which even Parliament could not alter; and this idea was strengthened by the new democratic doctrines embodied in the writings of Locke, Rousseau, and contrast others, with their emphasis on a "social compact basis of all government. The colonists also regarded representation as necessarily local, not general; and they could not see how they were represented by persons in whose election they had no right of participation. as the It may freely be conceded that legally the British ministers were right in their interpretation of the constitution, and the colonists wrong; but this by no means invalidates the justice of the American claims from a political and economic standpoint. It is noteworthy that although the supremacy of Parliament throughout the British Empire is now universally admitted, no attempt is made to assert that supremacy in the taxing of any of the self-governing colo nies. The oratorical material from which to choose in illustrating the Revolution is limited. Many important speeches were unreported, and of others we have only fragmentary accounts, preserved by tradition. Washington was a man of action, not a speaker. Jefferson was an indifferent orator, and preferred to express himself with the pen. And Samuel Adams, in spite of the flood of newspaper articles which he wrote, and resolutions and other state papers which he inspired, seems seldom to have attempted a speech of any length: the oration on American independence, published in his name in London, in 1776, and now often met with in oratorical reprints, has been shown by his biographer to be a forgery. (Wells, Life of Samuel Adams, II, pp. 439-40.) Nevertheless, there exists a sup |