ly for the Americans, this did not
happen. Washington knew our weakness so well that he could see how
easy it would be for a bold and determined enemy to do us great if not
fatal harm. But he did not know that the English themselves were in
an almost desperate plight. By Rodney's decisive victory at sea they
began to recover their ascendancy against the Coalition, but it was
then too late to disavow the treaty. In Parliament George III had been
defeated; the defeat meaning a very serious check to the policy which
he had pursued for more than twenty years to fix royal tyranny on the
British people. King George's system of personal government, himself
being the person, had broken down and he could not revive it. Nearly
seventy years were to elapse before Queen Victoria, who was as putty
in the hands of her German husband, Prince Albert, rejoiced that she
had restored the personal power of the British sovereign to a pitch it
had not known since her grandfather George III.

The American Revolution had illustrated the fatal weakness of the
Congress as an organ of government, and the Articles merely embodied
the vagueness of the American people in regard to any real regime. The
Congress has been much derided for its shortcomings and its blunders,
although in truth not so much the Congress, as those who made it, was
to blame. They had refused, in their timidity, to give it power to
exercise control. It might not compel or enforce obedience. It did
require General Washington during the war to furnish a regular report
of his military actions and it put his suggestions on file where
many of them grew yellow and dusty; but he might not strike, do that
decisive act by which history is born. Their timidity made them see
what he had accomplished not nearly so plainly as the dictator on
horseback whom their fears conjured up.

During the war the sense of a common danger had lent the Congress a
not easily defined but quite real coherence, which vanished when
peace came, and the local ideals of the States took precedence. Take
taxation. Congress could compute the quota of taxes which each State
ought to pay, but it had no way of collecting or of enforcing payment.
It took eighteen months to collect five per cent of the taxes laid in
1783. Of course a nation could not go on with such methods. No law
binding all the States could be adopted unless every one of the
thirteen States assented. Unanimity was almost unattainable; as when
Gover