and the British army was driven by famine in October to a surrender as humiliating as that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the wretched minister, who had till now suppressed at his master's order his own conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed. Opening his arms and pacing wildly about the room, Lord North exclaimed, "It is all over," and resigned. At this moment, indeed, the country seemed on the brink of ruin. In the very crisis of the struggle with America she found herself confronted with a danger nearer home [the Irish revolt of 1779].

up.

The blow which had shattered the attempt of England to wield an autocratic power over her colonies had shattered the attempt of its king to establish an autocratic power over England itself. The ministry which bore the name of Lord North had been a mere screen for the administration of George the Third, and its ruin was the ruin of the system he had striven to build Never again was the crown to possess such a power as he had wielded during the past ten years. For the moment, however, there was nothing to mark so decisive a change; and both to the king and his opponents it must have seemed only a new turn in the political game which they were playing when in March, 1782, the whigs returned to office. Though the tories and "king's friends" had now grown to a compact body of 150 members, who still followed Lord North, the whigs were superior to their rivals in numbers and political character, now that the return of the Bedford and Grenville sections to the general body of the party during its long and steady opposition to the war had restored much of its old cohesion. Rockingham was still its head; and on Rockingham fell the double task of satisfying Ireland and of putting an end, at any cost, to the war with the United States. The task involved in both quarters a humiliating surrender; for neither Ireland nor America would be satisfied save by a full concession of their claims. It needed the bitter stress of necessity to induce the English Parliament to follow Rockingham's counsels, but the need was too urgent to suffer their rejection. The houses, therefore, abandoned by a formal statute the judicial and legislative supremacy they had till then asserted over the parliament of Ireland; and from this moment England and Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sovereign of the one island was also the sovereign of the other. The grant of independence to the one great dependency made it easier to recognize the freedom of the other. Rockingham, in fact, took office with the purpose of winning

peace by a full acknowledgment of the independence of the United States, and negotiations were soon entered into for that purpose.

But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon courts to make no peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons, indeed, seemed secure. If terms like these were accepted the world empire of Britain was at an end. Stripped of her colonies in America, stripped of her rule in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back into a European state, into the England of the first Georges. And yet there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was paralyzed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her world power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. the 16th of January, 1780, Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening of 1782, the triumphs of the French admiral, De Grasse, called him to the West Indies; and on the 12th of April a maneuver, which he was the first to introduce, broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the Island of Newfoundland, and acknowledged without reserve the independence of the United States.

On

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The action of America ended the war; and the treaty of peace with the United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon powers. Their actual gains were insignifiFrance, indeed, won nothing in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and Minorca. Nor could they feel, even in this hour of their triumph, that the end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great effort against the world power of Britain they had utterly failed. She had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact. Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea, and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there was less thought of what she had retained than of what she had lost. She was parted from her American colonies; and at the moment such a parting seemed to be the knell of her greatness. In wealth, in population, the American colonies far surpassed all that remained of her empire; and the American colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of ruin, or that the Bourbon courts believed her position as a world power to be practically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception was the coming years were to show.

The energies of England were, in fact, spurred to new efforts by the crisis in her fortunes. The industrial development which followed the war gave her a material supremacy such as she had never known before, and the rapid growth of wealth which this industry brought with it raised her again into a mother of nations as her settlers built up in the waters of the Pacific colonies as great as those which she had lost on the coast of America. But if the Bourbons overrated their triumph in one way, they immensely underrated it in another. Whatever might be the importance of American independence in the history of England, it was of unequaled moment in the history of the world. If it crippled for a while the supremacy of the English nation, it founded a supremacy of the English race. From the hour of American independence the life of the English people has flowed not in one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little signs of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed the face of the world.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

[THOMAS JEFFERSON, the eminent American statesman and third President of the United States, was born at Shadwell, Albemarle County, Va., April 2, 1743. He attended William and Mary College, became a successful lawyer, and as a delegate to the first Continental Congress identified himself with the Revolutionary party. In 1776 he drew up the Declaration of Independence; was governor of Virginia (1779-1781); minister to France (1784-1789); and upon his return was appointed Secretary of State by Washington. About this time he became the leader of the new party, called at first Anti-Federalists, then Republicans, and finally Democrats. Jefferson was Vice President (1797); was elected President (1801), and reëlected (1804). The chief events of his two administrations were the war with Tripoli, the Louisiana Purchase, the reduction of the national debt, and the exploration of the West. Jefferson spent the latter part of his life at his beautiful residence, in Monticello, Va., where he died July 4, 1826, while the nation was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which he had drawn up. The death of John Adams also occurred on the same day.]

A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled.

WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long

train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature; a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the danger of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the