ion.

It is not likely that any form of government which Great Britain could
have established, especially if it excluded our people from its
control, could have maintained the union twenty-five years longer than
the relation actually existed. The future in some particulars was as
full of hope then to them as it is now to us. Many of their
anticipations were so sanguine that the reality has not been equal to
them. In 1763 an estimate was made that the population of New England
in 1835 would be 4,000,000. From this it is apparent that they had
already tasted prosperity and had come to understand the advantages of
our country, especially in the character of its population, over the
old countries of Europe.

The British Ministry did not discover the means by which the colonies
were to be retained, if retained at all. Our ancestors had little
respect for hereditary privileges and the pretensions of birth. They
were for the most part believers in the equality of the human race;
and, moreover, in their municipal governments, they had learned the
safety and power of universal suffrage. A few men only in England had
an accurate idea of American principles, or the difficulty of holding
in unwilling embrace three million people. Among the representatives
of this small class were the elder Pitt, Burke, and Wilkes.

Pitt declared that "three million people, so dead to all the feelings
of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit
instruments to make slaves of ourselves."

Said Wilkes, "Know, then, that a successful resistance is a revolution,
not a rebellion. Who can tell whether in a few years the independent
Americans may not celebrate the glorious era of the revolution of 1775
as we do that of 1688?" Nor did his prophetic eye fail to penetrate
even the distant future. "Where your fleets and armies are stationed,"
said he, "the possession will be secured, while they continue; but all
the rest will be lost. In the great scale of empire, you will decline,
I fear, from the decision of this day; and the Americans will rise to
independence, to power, to all the greatness of the most renowned
states; for _they build on the solid basis of general public liberty."_
These were words of wisdom; but nations, like individual men, learn
anything sooner than their own faults, and confess anything sooner than
their own mistakes.

It is difficult for the historian to understand the policy of
attempting to