ident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that
blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational
privilege as inevitable, and at last to see nothing strange in being
ruled by a class, whether of nobles or of mere parliamentarians. But the
man who looks at the world with the terrible eyes of his first innocence
can never see an unequal law as anything but an iniquity, or government
divorced from the general will as anything but usurpation.

CHAPTER II

ARMS AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Such was roughly the position of the thirteen English colonies in North
America when in the year 1764, shortly after the conclusion of the Seven
Years' War, George Grenville, who had become the chief Minister of
George III. after the failure of Lord Bute, proposed to raise a revenue
from these colonies by the imposition of a Stamp Act.

The Stamp Act and the resistance it met mark so obviously the beginning
of the business which ended in the separation of the United States from
Great Britain that Grenville and the British Parliament have been
frequently blamed for the lightness of heart with which they entered
upon so momentous a course. But in fact it did not seem to them
momentous, nor is it easy to say why they should have thought it
momentous. It is certain that Grenville's political opponents, many of
whom were afterwards to figure as the champions of the colonists, at
first saw its momentousness as little as he. They offered to his
proposal only the most perfunctory sort of opposition, less than they
habitually offered to all his measures, good or bad.

And, in point of fact, there was little reason why a Whig of the type
and class that then governed England should be startled or shocked by a
proposal to extend the English system of stamping documents to the
English colonies. That Parliament had the legal right to tax the
colonies was not seriously questionable. Under the British Constitution
the power of King, Lords and Commons over the King's subjects was and is
absolute, and none denied that the colonists were the King's subjects.
They pleaded indeed that their charters did not expressly authorize such
taxation; but neither did they expressly exclude it, and on a strict
construction it would certainly seem that a power which would have
existed if there had been no charter remained when the charter was
silent.

It might further be urged