adictory
are the judgments pronounced upon the course and conduct of
the war itself, even among American writers.

Until recently it has been impossible that either in the
United States or Great Britain a wholly dispassionate view
of the War of Independence should be shared by both critical
students and general readers. In America it has been the
fashion to glorify indiscriminately the actors on the
colonial side and all their achievements. The provincial
note of national heroics has been transmitted from one
generation to another, and the breath of the school children
has been carefully laden with it from tenderest years. On
the English side, the quite natural early resentment against
the lost colonies--mainly confined to official circles and
hereditary interests--may be said to have been later
softened into "a certain condescension," such as Lowell
pointed out in foreigners generally toward America.

But that condescension, like the earlier acrimony, is a
thing of the past. Here, as elsewhere, history is being
rewritten. American self-glorification, as well as wounded
English pride, gives way to better teachings, and the larger
lessons of humanity, which is more than nationality, are
giving to all nations clearer visions of a federated world.

The growth of this new historic sense, informed with clearer
knowledge and a more discriminating love of justice, is well
illustrated in the following critical examination, wherein
Ludlow, a living English historian, carefully considers the
various factors at work in the Revolution, and the personal
forces through which its results were produced. Prefixed to
this is the official statement of the American peace
commissioners--John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and
Henry Laurens--to Robert R. Livingston, then superintendent
of foreign affairs, of the conditions of the preliminary
treaty, which ended the war in 1782. This was followed by
the definitive Treaty of Paris, September 3, 1783.

THE AMERICAN PEACE COMMISSIONERS

PARIS, 14 December, 1782.

We have the honor to congratulate Congress on the signature of the
preliminaries of a peace between the Crown of Great Britain and the
United States of America, to be inserted in a definitive treaty so soon
as the t