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THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.

William Pitt was partly to blame for the Revolutionary War. He claimed
that the Colonists ought not to manufacture so much as a horseshoe nail
except by permission of Parliament.

It was already hard enough to be a colonist, without the privilege of
expressing one's self even to an Indian without being fined. But when we
pause to think that England seemed to demand that the colonist should
take the long wet walk to Liverpool during a busy season of the year to
get his horse shod, we say at once that P. Henry was right when he
exclaimed that the war was inevitable and moved that permission be
granted for it to come.

Then came the Stamp Act, making almost everything illegal that was not
written on stamp paper furnished by the maternal country.

John Adams, Patrick Henry, and John Otis made speeches regarding the
situation. Bells were tolled, and fasting and prayer marked the first of
November, the day for the law to go into effect.

These things alarmed England for the time, and the Stamp Act was
repealed; but the king, who had been pretty free with his money and had
entertained a good deal, began to look out for a chance to tax the
Colonists, and ordered his Exchequer Board to attend to it.

Patrick Henry got excited, and said in an early speech, "Caesar had his
Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third----" Here
he paused and took a long swig of pure water, and added, looking at the
newspaper reporters, "If this be treason, make the most of it." He also
said that George the Third might profit by their example. A good many
would like to know what he started out to say, but it is too hard to
determine.

[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY.]

Boston ladies gave up tea and used the dried leaves of the raspberry,
and the girls of 1777 graduated in homespun. Could the iron heel of
despotism crunch such a spirit of liberty as that? Scarcely. In one
family at Newport four hundred and eighty-seven yards of cloth and
thirty-six pairs of stockings were spun and made in eighteen months.

When the war broke out it is estimated that each Colonial soldier had
twenty-seven pairs of blue woollen socks with white double heels and
toes. Does the intelligent reader believe that "Tommy Atkins," with two
pairs of socks "and hit a-rainin'," could whip men with twenty-seven
pairs each? Not without restoratives.

Troops were now sent to restore order. They were clothed by the British
gover