winter of 1775,) "is in a great scrape. Their measures never can succeed. We, who have voted for them, have a right to complain; for they have deceived us, and, I suppose, themselves." 1 The same disheartening conviction was now brought home to every private individual who could spare five minutes a day to the consideration of public affairs. After eight years of military occupation, and twenty-one months of very hard fighting, America was far from being conquered, and farther yet from being convinced that her interest lay in submission to the demands of the British Parliament.

The situation was clearly understood, and temperately but unanswerably exposed, by discerning onlookers in either country. An American Whig, at the very moment when the prospects of his own cause were darkest, made a cool and careful estimate of the English chances. "Their whole hope of success," he said, "depends upon frequent and decisive victories, gained before our army is disciplined. The expense of feeding and paying great fleets and armies, at such a distance, is too enormous for any nation on earth to bear for a great while. It is said that ninety thousand tons of shipping are employed in their service constantly, at thirteen shillings and four pence a ton per month. When our soldiers are enlisted for the war, discipline must daily increase. Our army can be recruited after a defeat, while our enemies must cross the Atlantic to repair a misfortune. Have we felt a tenth part of the hardships the States of Holland suffered at the hands of Spain; or does our case look half so difficult? States are not conquered by victories. After a succession of splendid victories obtained over France by the Duke of Marlborough, in each of which more men were slain than in the whole of this war, still that kingdom made a formidable resistance, and obtained an honourable peace." 2

1 George Selwyn and his Contemporaries; Vol. III., page 114, of the Edition of 1844.

American newspaper article of December 24, 1776; signed "Perse

verance."

That was written in December 1776, when all the victories which hitherto marked the campaign had been scored by the British. After Trenton and Princeton were fought, and Howe had retired from the Jerseys, the same views were yet more powerfully enforced by a Londoner. "The small scale of our maps deceived us; and, as the word 'America' takes up no more room than the word Yorkshire,' we seem to think the territories they represent are much of the same bigness; though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice. Braddock might tell the difficulties of this loose, rugged country, were he living. Amherst might still do it. Yet these officers found a willing people to help them, and General Howe finds nothing willing. We have undertaken a war against farmers and farmhouses, scattered through a wild waste of continent, and shall soon hear of our General being obliged to garrison woods, to scale mountains, to wait for boats and pontoons at rivers, and to have his convoys and escorts as large as armies. These, and a thousand such difficulties, will rise on us at the next stage of the war. I say the next stage, because we have hitherto spent one campaign, and some millions, in losing one landing-place at Boston; and, at the charge of seven millions and a second campaign, we have replaced it with two other landing-places at Rhode Island and New York. I am entirely of opinion with Voltaire that every great conqueror must be a great politician. Something more is required, than the mere mechanical business of fighting, in composing revolts and bringing back things to their former order." 1

The keenest eye in Europe already foresaw the inevitable issue. Frederic of Prussia had won and lost many battles, and had learned not to over-rate the importance of any single defeat or victory. He had followed Washington, through the vicissitudes of the protracted struggle, with the insight and sympathy of one who himself had striven against fearful odds; who had committed grievous mistakes, and had profited by his lesson; and 1 Letter from London of February 1777.

who had at length emerged, secure and successful, from a flood of war in which both friends and enemies, for years together, felt assured that nothing could save him from being overwhelmed. With such an experience he did not need to wait for Saratoga and Yorktown in order to be convinced that Great Britain had involved herself in a hopeless task. All the information which he had received, (so he wrote in the first half of March 1777,) went to show that the colonies would attain, and keep, their independence.1 That was how the future was regarded by the greatest warrior of the age; and the facts of the case, as he knew them, were the property of all the world. Civilians, who had never seen a cannon fired, but who could use their common sense, had plenty of material on which to build an estimate of the military probabilities. Abundant and most discouraging intelligence appeared in private letters from officers in America, which were freely published in the English journals; and even those who took in the "London Gazette," and no other newspaper, might find very serious matter for reflection as they read between the lines of Sir William Howe's despatches.

There was, however, an aspect of the question which occupied and concerned our ancestors far more deeply than any purely military considerations. It must never be forgotten that many Englishmen from the first, — and in the end a decided, and indeed a very large, majority among them, regarded the contest which was being fought out in America not as a foreign war, but as a civil war in which English liberty was the stake. They held that a policy had been deliberately initiated, and during half a generation had been resolutely pursued, of which the avowed object was to make the Royal power dominant in the State; and the historians in highest repute, who since have treated of those times, unreservedly maintain the same view. That policy had now prevailed; and Personal Government, from a mischievous theory, had grown into a portentous reality. The vic1 Le Roi Frédéric au Comte de Maltzan; Potsdam, 13 mars, 1777.

tory of the Crown had been preceded by an epoch of continuous and bitter strife, every stage in which was marked by deplorable incidents. The publication through the press of opinions obnoxious to the Court had been punished with unsparing severity. The right of constituents to elect a person of their choice had been denied in words, and repeatedly violated in practice. The benches of the Lords and the Commons swarmed with an ever increasing band of placemen and pensioners subsidised by the King; and these gentlemen well knew the work which their paymaster expected of them. Their vocation was to harass any minister who conceived that he owed a duty to the people as well as to the Sovereign; and to betray and ruin him if he proved incorrigible in his notions of patriotism. The most famous English statesmen, - all, it is not too much to say, who are now remembered with pride by Englishmen of every party, were shut out from the opportunity, and even from the hope, of office; and our national qualities of manliness and independence had come to be a standing disqualification for employment in the nation's service. At last the Cabinet had picked a quarrel with the colonies over the very same question which convulsed England in the days of Strafford and the ship-money. In order to vindicate the doctrine that taxation might be imposed without representation, the servants of the Crown, or rather its bondsmen, (for the Prime Minister, and the most respectable of his colleagues, were in this matter acting under compulsion, and against their consciences,) had undertaken to coerce the communities in America with fire and sword, and to visit individuals with the extreme penalties of rebellion. It followed, as a natural and certain consequence, that the party, which resented the encroachments of the Crown at home, sincerely and universally entertained a belief which influenced their whole view of the colonial controversy. That belief had been placed on record, in quiet but expressive language, by a nobleman who, in his honoured age, lived among us as the last of the old Whigs. Lord Albemarle

distinctly states that in 1774, and for some years afterwards, the Opposition were possessed by "a deep and well-grounded conviction that, if despotism were once established in America, arbitrary government would at least be attempted in the mother-country." 1

Those apprehensions were shared by men whose judgement cannot lightly be set aside, and the strength of whose patriotism was many degrees above proof. Chatham, when he spoke in public, dwelt mainly upon the rights of the colonists, the duty of England, and the appalling military dangers which would result to the Empire if those rights were invaded and that duty ignored. With the instinct of a great orator, he did not willingly introduce fresh debateable matter into a controversy where he had so many sufficient and self-evident arguments ready to his hand; but his private correspondence clearly indicates that the keenness of his emotion, and the warmth of his advocacy, were closely connected with a profound belief that, if America were subjugated, Britain would not long be free. Would to Heaven, (he wrote,) that England was not doomed to bind round her own hands, and wear patiently, the chains which she was forging for her colonies! And then he quoted, with telling effect, the passage in which Juvenal described how the spread of servility among the Roman people, and the corruption of their public spirit, avenged the wrongs of the subject world upon the conquerors themselves. 2

The fears which Chatham acknowledged were confessed likewise by the only man, then alive, whose authority stands on a level with his own. In the early spring of 1777 Burke affirmed that the American war had done more in a very few years, than all other causes could have done in a century, to prepare the minds of

1 Those words are found in the tenth chapter of the second volume of Lord Rockingham's Memoirs. Lord Albemarle, who had played trap-ball with Charles Fox, lived to hold an extemporised levée of London society on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day when he carried the colours on to the field of Waterloo.

2 The Earl of Chatham to Mr. Sheriff Sayre; Hayes, August 28, 1774.