ishment
of good laws. As I have already indicated, the dislike and the
systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period
when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably
sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension. However true that
may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more
heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any
other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar
conditions. Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always
seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake
cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of
character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case
against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has,
at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa,
and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their
faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material
for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the
revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public
spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking,
vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify,
and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for
self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition
in the case of Ireland. Mr. J.W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining
historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it
can be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts--men of his
own national stock--as the pestilent offspring of an "irreconcilable
faction," which had originally left England deeply imbued with the
doctrines of Republicanism. Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge
retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of
meanness and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and
refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too
contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the
maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is always the "mob," the
"ruffians," the "rabble," of Boston who carry out the reprisals against
the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth
century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of
unscrupulous "a