ive and by its agents, it
marks an important point in the progress of American independence. A bow
more, a sarcasm less, might have confirmed the power of a man whose
deep-rooted hatred of England was fast hastening to its natural
termination, an open rupture; and a premature rupture would have brought
the Colonists into the field, either as the subjects of England or as
the allies of France. To secure the dependence of the Colonies, England
would have been compelled to make large concessions; and timely
concessions might have put off the day of separation for another
century. To secure the alliance of the Colonies, France would have been
compelled to take upon herself the burden of the war; a French general
might have led our armies; French gold might have paid our troops; we
might have been spared the sufferings of Valley Forge, the humiliation
of bankruptcy; but where would have been the wise discipline of
adversity? and if great examples be as essential to the formation of
national as of individual character, what would the name of independence
have been to us, without the example of our Washington?

French diplomacy had little to do with the American events of the next
five years. England, unconscious how near she had been to a new war with
her old enemy, held blindly on in her course of irritation and
oppression; the Colonies continued to advance by sure steps from
resistance by votes and resolves to resistance by the sword. When Louis
XVI. ascended the throne in 1774, and Vergennes received the portfolio
of Foreign Affairs, domestic interests pressed too hard upon them to
allow of their resuming at once the vast plans of the fallen minister.
Unlike that Minister, Vergennes, a diplomatist by profession, preferred
watching and waiting events to hastening or anticipating hem. But to
watch and wait events like those which were then passing in the Colonies
without being drawn into the vortex was beyond the power of even his
well-trained and sagacious mind. In 1775, a French emissary was again
taking the measure of American perseverance, French ambassadors were
again bringing forward American questions as the most important
questions of their correspondence. That expression which has been put
into so many mouths as a summing up of the value of a victory was
applied in substance by Vergennes to the Battle of Bunker Hill,--"Two
more victories of this kind, and the English will have no army left in
America."

And while