frJL96ei*i 
 
 VOLUME XIX 
 
 SEPTEMBER, 1919 
 
 NUMBER 11 
 
 BULLETIN OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 
 
 •v*W.VSf* 
 
 PHI BETA KAPPA ORATION 
 
 JUNE 18th, 1919 
 Present-Day Thoughts on the American Revolution 
 
 PROFESSOR CHARLES AVcLEAN ANDREWS 
 ol Yale University 
 
 Entered at the Post Office at Athens, ua., as Second Class Matter, August 31, 1D05. 
 under Act of Congress of July 16th. 1904. Issu< 1 Monthly by tbe University. 
 
 Serial No. 305 
 

 (d 
 
 \ 
 
 PRESENT-DAY THOUGHTS ON THE AMERICAN 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 PHI BETA KAPPA ORATION 
 
 Professor Charles McLean Andrews, of Yale University. 
 
 iln the dual role which has been assigned to me this morning 
 of Phi Beta Kappa speaker and commencement orator, I have the 
 very great honor of addressing you not only as citizens of this great 
 republic, keenly alive to every event taking place in the world today, 
 but also as a brotherhood of scholars, familiar with the value that 
 scholarship has for the man of affairs and appreciative of the con- 
 tributions which scholarship is making everywhere to the solution 
 of the practical problems of the age. In the presence of the seem- 
 ing chaos produced by this great human catastrophe of the World 
 War, there arises an urgent call for such knowledge of the past as 
 may enable us to control the riotous and disordered array of our 
 thoughts and to balance the forces of pessimism and optimism that 
 struggle within us for the mastery. Without the touchstone of his- 
 tory, the world may well seem to us a world in ruins, a seething 
 human cauldron of revolution, civil war, and anarchy; for the foun- 
 dation stones of society have been loosened, and for years to come 
 there will exist unsettlement and change as the result of the fires 
 that have burned through the crust of the existing order and are 
 altering fundamentally the conditions of civilized life. So it has 
 happened before in times of crisis in human affairs that the founda- 
 tions of the world have trembled beneath the onward tread of those 
 inexorable forces, to which in chronicled form we give the name of 
 history. 
 
 To the historian the present situation represents, though on a 
 scale more gigantic than ever before, the struggles of an intrin- 
 sically healthy and solvent human society to cure the diseases every- 
 where prevailing within its political and industrial systems. The 
 physicians may not be now, as they have frequently not been in the 
 past, men of superlative sagacity, experience, and wisdom, but their 
 efforts mark a healthy functioning process, which in the end will 
 bring to the human race new life and vigor, peace, order, and pros- 
 perity, where now confusion and disturbance reign supreme. These 
 things must be. Through one great struggle after another man ha* 
 staggered forward to an unknown goal, uncertain even of the path 
 of his progress, trusting that the way of his going is guided by the 
 destinies that lie deep-seated within him, the spiritual law of his 
 being. With each generation the load becomes heavier, the prob- 
 lem of its burden more complex, as the area of mutual action and 
 interaction among the nations widens and the submerged classes 
 rise to prominence, overthrowing privilege and preferment, and 
 compelling a recasting of political, social, and industrial relations 
 in the interest of a greater number of self-conscious and awakened 
 
men and women than have ever before demanded and exercised a 
 <part in the world's affairs. 
 
 To meet the new conditions, the leaders of the victorious nations 
 are devising not only terms of peace but also new machinery, 
 whereby reorganization and reconstruction can be effected and main- 
 tained. On one hand, they are perfecting a League of Nations, 
 perhaps the most daring innovation in human political organiza- 
 tion that the world has ever known. On the other, they are consid- 
 ering, as never before in the history of peace congresses, the welfare 
 of peoples rather than the claims of governments, and are facing 
 with sincerity and courage the incontestable fact that the future 
 peace and prosperity of the world rests, not on the adjustment of 
 boundaries or even on the recognition of new racial groups but on 
 the establishment, of high labor standards by means of international 
 agreements and a better definition of the principles that must gov- 
 ern the relations of capitalists and the working classes in every 
 state where social justice prevails. 
 
 With all its faults, and if we are to 'believe its critics they are 
 many, the League of Nations represents a mighty forward move- 
 ment, as far in advance of any understanding hitherto reached 
 among the nations as are the ideas of the twentieth century in ad- 
 vance of those of the eighteenth. It is no agreement of kings or of 
 royal plenipotentiaries; it is not the work of privileged class or 
 caste; whatever its limitations, it is a manifestation of popular 
 wills, expressed, in the majority of instances, through chosen rep- 
 resentatives, and designed to further not only peace among the 
 nations but the interests of those who make up the main body of 
 their peoples. How it will operate no man can tell. It will face 
 problems of terrible complexity; divided and antagonistic interests 
 that seem to admit of no compromise; new issues that have for their 
 settlement neither precedent nor example; and obstructions that will 
 appear at times almost unsurmountable. These are the inevitable 
 reactions that follow vast social disturbances, the growing pains 
 of a dynamic society that is progressing, often in curiously blunder- 
 ing fashion, toward higher ideals of equity and justice. The deferred 
 peace-time activities of four years, the rehabilitation of war-worn 
 property, the need of credit for the resumption of business enter- 
 prise, the immediate requirements of distressed and stricken peo- 
 ples — all these aggregate a total of work to be done, of wounds to 
 be healed, of mouths to be fed, of industry to be reorganized, of 
 patience and forbearance to be exercised never before equaled in the 
 memory of man. There will be confusion, conflict, and perplexity 
 before a normal condition is achieved; there will be much adjust- 
 ment and much measuring up to greater responsibilities during this 
 reconstructive process which is leading to new and better human 
 relationships. Over and over again has history shown us changes 
 apparently for the worse, which in reality were but manifestations 
 of a transition to higher forms of social organization and methods 
 of government. To the historian the future is to be trusted not 
 dreaded, and he prefers to cultivate in himself what some goocl 
 
priest said of his religion, "A great deal of faith tempered by a 
 little doubt, not a great deal of doubt tempered by a little faith." 
 
 One feature of the war that is of conspicuous significance in its 
 promise for the future is the drawing together of 'Great Britain and 
 the United States in a new fellowship of understanding and esteem, 
 due not merely to a sense of common danger and an association in 
 arms, but even more to a sentiment born of oneness of language, 
 institutions, and purpose. Whatever may have been the contro- 
 versies in the past between the two great ibranches of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, both before and since the shock of revolution broke the 
 ties of colonial relationship, the events of the World War have ban- 
 ished without likelihood of return the bitterness engendered thereby 
 and have aroused to an extent never before known a feeling of 
 respect, charity, and good will. The two nations have awakened to 
 a consciousness of common kinship and common ideals and to a 
 realization of the fact that despite differences of opinion, habit, and 
 temperament — the inevitable consequences of environment and his- 
 torical circumstances — they are fundamentally alike in their views 
 of political liberty and their standards of social justice, for which 
 each has in its own way struggled in the past. Great Britain and 
 the United States stand as sponsors for a progressive and liberal 
 civilization, not as unwilling allies but as two great powers actuated 
 by principles and traditions derived from a common source and 
 united to defend common ideals in life and government. Such 
 mutual understanding, once entered upon with sincerity and con- 
 viction, cannot be broken, for it rests to an extent never realized 
 before upon the 'belief that these two peoples working in harmony 
 are trustees for the civilization not only of the Old World but also 
 of the New. 
 
 Perhaps the most serious obstacle to a harmonious rapprochement 
 between the two countries is in character not economic or com- 
 mercial but sentimental. The competition of the United States in 
 the field of industrialism has been very great and has exercised a 
 direct and powerful influence on the business activities and meth- 
 ods of Great Britain herself, but it has never roused a feeling of 
 antagonism and distrust between the two peoples, except here and 
 there and temporarily. More deeply seated than any commercial 
 jealousy or dislike is the time-honored antipathy due to the Amer- 
 ican interpretation of the facts of our early history. I know of no 
 phenomenon in the realm of psychology, unless it be the state of 
 the German mind or the attitude of the Irish toward the English 
 at the present time, that is more extraordinary than this persistence 
 of the idea that England has with malice aforethought selfishly and 
 maliciously set out to conquer the world to her own advantage. 
 Such an idea springs from a false reading of both English and 
 American history and from the unworthy habit of imputing motives 
 of self interest and desire for aggrandizement, where such motives 
 have never existed. Had the British empire been 'built on a foun- 
 dation of brute force, tyranny, and fraud the charge might be justi- 
 fied, but in fact the contrary is true, the empire has grown up, not 
 
through conscious plan of kings and statesmen but through his- 
 torical necessity, expressive of the instincts and strivings of a com- 
 mercial and colonizing people. Sir John Seeley once said that the 
 British had "conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence 
 of mind," but it would perhaps be truer to say that they had done 
 so more or less unintentionally and in a sense unwillingly, shrink- 
 ing from rather than seeking the burdens and responsibilities of 
 empire, driven on by circumstances that no honorable people would 
 wish to avoid. Far from me to say that the acts of individual 
 Englishmen have always been above reproach or that the means 
 employed have always been free from selfishness or disregard of the 
 interests of others — for in fact, Great Britain must bear her 
 full share of the world's sins and blunders, — but taken as a whole 
 no one can deny that the development of the British constitution 
 and the expansion of the British empire has served an enormously 
 useful purpose in the social evolution of the human race. General 
 Smuts has recently said that the British empire is the most import- 
 ant and fascinating problem in political and constitutional govern- 
 ment that the world has ever seen: and one of the opponents of 
 British rule in India, a native revolutionist, has lately borne wit- 
 ness to a change of heart in asserting that "English history, be- 
 ginning with Magna Charta and ending with the law granting 
 suffrage to women is the most complete record of 'freedom slowly 
 broadening from precedent to precedent' in the annals of human 
 evolution." "It has been well said," he adds, "that you cannot 
 argue a man into slavery in the English language. You must 
 live in England, learn from England, work with English men and 
 English women, and study English and American history, if you are 
 to catch a breath of that spirit which has made England free and 
 great." To the historian there is nothing remarkable about these 
 statements; they are chiefly significant as coming from former op- 
 ponents of the British empire. 
 
 More important for our purpose here is it to examine the nature 
 of the enmity arising from the incidents of our Revolutionary his- 
 tory and to discover why it is that the historian approaching the 
 subject with an open and unbiased mind is often bewildered by the 
 fictitious character of popular judgments. He finds widely preva- 
 lent in America a very curious attitude toward the events and per- 
 sonalities of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary eras. He 
 finds that these events and persons have become in a measure sac- 
 rosanct, the objects of an almost idolatrous veneration, hallowed in 
 an atmosphere of piety and patriotism, and guarded from the in- 
 trusion of the truth-seeker by vigilant keepers — patriotic societies, 
 local societies, race societies, and other self-appointed custodians, 
 whose inclination is to raise the men of the past above the level of 
 ordinary mortals and to treat the traditions of our past as if they 
 were revelations of the Most High. These legends of the American 
 Revolution have done much to keep alive among succeeding gener- 
 ations a spirit of unfriendliness for England that is unworthy of a 
 great and intelligent people. Some of the statements contained in 
 
the Declaration of Independence — a document written in the heat of 
 excitement and with ibitter intensity of feeling; — the strongly anti- 
 British text-books, which have been wont to picture British king 
 and ministry as possessed of cunning and malevolence, oppressors 
 of the colonists and enemies of the human race; the teachings of 
 Bancroft and his school, among whom we must count, unhappily, 
 the latest popular historian of the Revolution, Sir George Trevelyan 
 — all these elements have tended to perpetuate an unreal version of 
 our relations with England both before and during the Revolution. 
 A version of this kind once in print cannot easily be changed. So 
 extreme often is the antagonism of political speakers and legis- 
 lators, writers and patriotic societies, that one is at times forced to 
 conclude that the average American cares little for the truth of his 
 own history and that if what he reads sufficiently glorifies his 
 country's past he will search no further. There is an old Latin 
 saying that a people which wishes to be deceived will be deceived, 
 and the American who is content with an interpretation that trans- 
 forms incidents into miracles and leaders into demigods naturally is 
 •bound to resent the effort of the historian to treat either events or 
 individuals as human. To many an American the Revolution has 
 become, as Mr. Sidney Fisher has wittily said, not a revolution but 
 a social function, in which all scholarly, refined, and conservative 
 persons might unhesitatingly have taken part. 
 
 But the healthy instinct of future generations will not be content 
 with such a vapid interpretation of our past; it will demand the 
 truth, no matter how little flattering it may prove to be; and the 
 day will come — in fact it is not far distant — when our history will 
 be studied for its own sake and when the events of our Revolution 
 will no longer be used to glorify ancestors, to justify racial claims 
 to prominence in our struggle for independence, or, what Is worse 
 than all else, to increase the animosity toward Great Britain on 
 the basis of events occurring a century and a half ago. Many of 
 the current interpretations of our Revolutionary history are merely 
 forms of propaganda designed for party advantage or founded on 
 mistaken ideas of patriotic duty. And when all these are swept 
 away and the events of these momentous years are studied for the 
 truth that is in them then only will the profession of historian have 
 come into its own in America. 
 
 We have gone about the study of the Revolution in the wrong 
 way. We have made too munh of the persons concerned, taking 
 them out of their setting, and clothing them with attributes which 
 are often the products of our own imagination. We have pictured 
 our ancestors as we have wished them to be and not as they were. 
 We have made no adequate attempt to comprehend the deep-seated 
 contrasts between the two countries and the different ways of think- 
 ing and feeling that made it almost impossible for each to under- 
 stand the other. Single individuals, no matter how important, do 
 not create and stop revolutions at will, however much they may lead 
 and direct them. Such persons are themselves subject to the con- 
 ditions that surround them and to the environment in which they 
 
are placed. Connected with every revolution are two great and 
 powerful influences, the conservative and the radical, each with its 
 habits, impulses, and convictions and each must be studied with 
 equal thoroughness, care, and sympathy. Yet how many of the 
 writers, who have so glibly condemned England for tyranny, craft, 
 and selfish ambitions, have any real knowledge of the spirit which 
 governed her at the time of our Revolution or of the irreconcilable 
 differences that existed between the point of view of an English 
 conservative and that of a colonial radical. Is it fair to draw 
 conclusions when we know only half of the story or when we have 
 no sufficient appreciation of the real issues at stake? Most of our 
 children learn their history through the medium of biography and 
 to them George III was a monster of wickedness, responsible for the 
 Revolution and the loss to Great Britain of her colonies. What a 
 trivial explanation of a cosmic event! I believe that it would be 
 possible to teach the truth even to the children, if only we had the 
 right kind of text-books and the right kind of teachers who them- 
 selves understand the issues involved. 
 
 What were these issues? Briefly stated they were as follows: 
 For a hundred years before the Revolution, the colonies and the 
 mother country had been moving in exactly opposite directions, the 
 former toward intensive self-government, the latter toward empire. 
 The colonists were absorbed in themselves, thinking only of their 
 rights as individuals and their privileges as members of self-gov- 
 erning communities. They were paying no attention to the world 
 of affairs outside of themselves or to the interests of the mother 
 country across the seas. On the other hand Great Britain was 
 moving toward enlargement and expansion; her ministries, with 
 vast accessions of territory unexpectedly thrust upon them, were 
 endeavoring often in bewilderment and unconcealed dismay to unify 
 and centralize the many varied and far-flung dependencies of the 
 British crown. Distracted by the problems and responsibilities of 
 empire, they were paying very little attention to affairs at home and 
 were neglecting the domestic needs of the English people. Among 
 these problems none was greater than this: could they reconcile 
 the divergent and antagonistic tendencies of colonies and mother 
 country and adjust the colonial demand for greater freedom and 
 self-control to the equally imperative need of preserving the integ- 
 rity of the empire; or were the differences to go on widening and 
 deepening until all hope of reconciliation was past and war only 
 could decide the issue? We know the answer, for the War of the 
 American Revolution shows the failure of the British policy, and 
 shows further that the statesmen of the eighteenth century — Brit- 
 ish and colonial alike — were unable to find at that time a solution 
 of the colonial problem, whereby the American colonies — the first 
 of Britain's great self-governing dominions — could be retained as 
 part of the British empire. It shows that British leaders had no 
 vision of an imperial union based on equality and liberty and held 
 together by ties of sentiment and affection. They did not realize 
 that there was something radically wrong in their management of 
 
 6 
 
colonial affairs and that to apply coercion to a proud and self- 
 willed people was at best a crude and irremediable blunder. 
 
 Yet even so, the failure to solve the colonial problem, as rt is 
 being solved today, does not explain why reconciliation was not 
 effected and why some working form of adjustment was not arrived 
 at. There can be no doubt that at first a majority of the colonists 
 did not want revolution. They looked on the connection with Eng- 
 land as necessary and beneficial and preferred to maintain it as 
 long as it was possible to do so. They would have been content 
 with moderate concessions and had such been made it seems more 
 than likely that the conservative majority in America would have 
 been able to prevent the radical minority from going to extremes 
 and committing the country to war. Over and over again in study- 
 ing the period from 1764 to 1774, we are driven to believe that a 
 little more yielding, a little more of the spirit of friendship and 
 compromise on both sides, would have calmed the troubled waters 
 and stilled the storm that was brewing. Why a dispute about trade, 
 which could have been ended with satisfaction to both parties, and 
 a dispute about taxation, which in its chief features was quieted by 
 the repeal of the acts that provoked it, should have developed into 
 an angry rupture, accompanied by defiance and coercion and fol- 
 lowed by war, is one of the questions that cannot be answered except 
 by a study of conditions that do not lie observable on the surface. 
 
 England at this time was an old and settled country, with the 
 traditions behind her of more than a thousand years. She had 
 passed through a long period of unrest, ending in the so-called 
 "glorious" Revolution of 1688 — a revolution which brought neither 
 glory nor political advantage to the majority of the English people 
 — and hal emerged into the placid calm of the eighteenth century, 
 during which those in power firmly believed that in all essential 
 particulars their system of government was the best in the world 
 and needed no important change or improvement. The era was 
 marked by good feeling, except for the petty bickering of political 
 factions, and by complacent satisfaction among those who held in 
 their hands the reins of government. These men were middle class 
 in origin and interest and they alone controlled the voting and could 
 sit in parliament. Heavy disabilities and penalties lay upon Roman 
 Catholics, Unitarians, and Jews, and even Dissenters were barred 
 from the borough offices. The nobility, who as a rule had a middle 
 class background, were in accord with the mercantile element in 
 their eagerness for trade and speculation, and in conjunction with 
 the monied gentry, the merchants, and the lawyers, constituted the 
 privileged part of the nation — the rulers as contrasted with the 
 ruled. This privileged class, composing but a very small part of the 
 people of the United Kingdom, exercised political power, monopo- 
 lized the offices of state, dominated parliament, and directly or in- 
 directly determined the policies of ministries and shaped legisla- 
 tion. Their supremacy was unchallenged, for the lower classes were 
 powerless to oppose them. Their activities were regulated by the 
 only standard which they understood — the standard of money. 
 
Brains and birth counted for little, except as middle class ad- 
 juncts, and honesty, responsibility, and devotion to duty were qual- 
 ities more honored in the breach than in the observance. Bribery 
 in elections, peculation and fraud in administrations, avarice in 
 family relations, and a general scramble for personal profit made 
 the era one of sordid ambitions and unjust distribution of wealth. 
 England at the time of our Revolution was a middle class hunting 
 ground, in which civil and military offices were deemed legitimate 
 prey for the spoiler. 
 
 Executive control was in the hands of a whig and tory oligarchy, 
 and parliament, where the middle class reigned supreme, was a kind 
 of close corporation, screened from the outside world and secret in 
 Its proceedings. To publish debates or division lists was not only 
 a high indiginity but also a notorious breach of privilege. The mem- 
 bers, safe from publicity, were lax in attendance and dilatory in leg- 
 islation and were concerned more with the laws relating to middle 
 class interests than with such as provided for reform or laid down 
 any great principles of government or administration. The middle 
 class mind was not progressive. It was embedded in tradition and 
 dominated by fixed ideas of political and social relations. The 
 rights of property were more important than the claims of humanity 
 and the idea of passing laws for the benefit and uplift of the lower 
 classes — workmen, artisans, and agricultural and mining laborers, 
 not yet awakened to class consciousness — was almost entirely ab- 
 sent from their thoughts. Christopher Gadsden's reference to 
 "those latent though inherent rights of society, which no climate, 
 no time, no constitution, no contract can ever destroy or diminish" 
 would have seemed to the middle class Englishman of the eighteenth 
 century a mere flight of fancy, having no meaning for an everyday 
 world. He could not possibly have seen its application either to 
 the restless and high-spirited colonists in America or to the un- 
 privileged and moneyless classes in England. 
 
 The House of Commons, which originated the laws so obnoxious 
 to the colonists, had become at this time the leading member of the 
 law-making body, and its statutes were already supplanting the 
 executive orders in council as instruments of government both in 
 England and in the colonies. This advance to a position of leader- 
 ship over the House of Lords developed in the commoners a sense of 
 solidarity that had hardly existed before and awakened in them a 
 consciousness of power and authority that rendered them extraor- 
 dinarily sensitive to their rights and privileges, particularly after 
 1760. To "insult" crown and government, as did John Wilkes in 
 the North Briton, or to question their competency to legislate for 
 America, as did the colonists after 1765, were acts defiant of con- 
 stituted authority deserving condemnation and punishment. Ex- 
 cept in a few noteworthy cases, such as those of Pitt, Conway, 
 Barre, Burke, and other sympathizers with America, members of 
 the ministries and of parliament saw in colonial complaints no re- 
 flection upon their own conduct of government, no manifestation 
 of discontent based on legitimate grievances. They were beginning 
 
 8 
 
to believe that government by parliament, as it then existed, was 
 part of the divine law. 
 
 The official middle class mind was obsessed with a veneration of 
 the constitution, a passion for legality, and a deep-seated hostility 
 to reform, especially in the crude and elementary franchise which 
 made possible their domination of political and parliamentary office. 
 (More important for our purpose was their aversion to the very idea 
 of the "liberty" which the colonists demanded and their unchang- 
 ing conviction that a colony was of necessity a subordinate and con- 
 tributory part of the British empire, and must continue to be so, 
 as long as it remained a colony. Though there were many in Eng- 
 land who thoroughly disliked the government's policy of taxation 
 and coercion as applied to America and though there were a few, 
 among whom was George Grenville himself, who saw that some 
 day the colonies would probably become a separate kingdom, 
 nevertheless it is doubtful if there were any — not even Burke or 
 Pitt or others friendly to America — who thought it wise to change 
 in any important particular the policy that rendered the colonies 
 serviceable to England. Even Adam Smith viewed the colonial 
 demand for economic freedom and legislative independence as im- 
 possible, and believed that colonies which recognized no obligations 
 toward the mother country were worse than useless and that it were 
 better to have no colonies at all than those that were unremuner- 
 ative. 
 
 iSuch was England at the time of her trouble with the colonies: 
 a land of two nations, one privileged and honored, divinely invested 
 with the right to rule; the other unprivileged and ignored, equally 
 appointed by the eternal law to be ruled. The colonists faced an 
 old country, with a highly developed and complex social organiza- 
 tion, in which manufactures, industry, trade, and commerce — marks 
 of a socialized state — were more important than agriculture, and 
 where rights based on history, law, and the possession of property 
 were cultivated to the complete atrophy of those that were merely 
 human. They faced a privileged ruling class, sensitive, exclusive, 
 and inclined to arrogance, deeply concerned with mercantile inter- 
 ests and the maintenance of their own power, and caring but little 
 for art, literature, and the finer spiritual aspects of life. 
 
 In contrast to this highly conventionalized society, with its 
 stereotyped system of thought and government, the American col- 
 onies constituted an agricultural frontier with an environment that 
 was favorable to the development of man as an individual rather 
 than as a member of society. The New England towns, which in 
 most instances were agricultural communities, and in which, out- 
 side of Boston, the population ran from a few hundreds to a thous- 
 and or two, tended to be radical in feeling. Dominated by the 
 Congregational system of church organization and overcharged with 
 the spirit of self-government, in that they gave to every voting in- 
 habitant an opportunity of expressing his own opinion, they were 
 environed with an atmosphere of individualism that was congenial 
 to the growth of such doctrines as those of natural rights, in- 
 
 9 
 
dependent of law, convention, and tradition, and hostile to all 
 ideas based only on history, precedent, and man-made statute. 
 "God and nature brought us into the world free men," said the 
 Wallingford fathers, "and by solemn charter, compact, and agree- 
 ment we came into the English constitution." iSuch a statement as 
 this simply could not have been understood by a member of the 
 British ministry or of parliament, or by a legal adviser of the 
 crown, all of whom would have called it nonsense, as from a consti- 
 tutional point of view it was. 
 
 This radical attitude of the colonists is admirably expressed in a 
 Massachusetts statement of 1762: "The natural rights of the col- 
 onists, we humbly conceive to be the same with those of all other 
 British subjects and indeed of all mankind. The principal of these 
 rights is to be 'free from any superior power on earth and not to 
 be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only 
 the law of nature for his rule.' In general freedom of men under 
 government is to have standing fundamental rules to live by, com- 
 mon to every one of that society and made by the legislative power 
 erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things where 
 that rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, 
 uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man. This liberty 
 is not only the right of Britons and British subjects, but the right 
 of all men in society, and is so inherent that they can't give it up 
 without becoming slaves, by which they forfeit even life itself. 
 Civil society, great and small, is but the union of many, for the 
 mutual preservation of life, liberty, and estate. These notions of 
 liberty had the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the same idea had 
 our ancestors in Britain, long before the discovery of America. 
 Most of the transactions from the grant of Magna Charta to the 
 Revolution [of 1688] may be considered as one combined struggle 
 between prince and people, all tending to that happy establishment 
 which Great Britain has since enjoyed and is every day increasing 
 to perfection." 
 
 Except for the last statement, with which he could have heartily 
 agreed, the average Englishman of the privileged class would have 
 found these utterances not only unintelligible but positively danger- 
 ous, as much so as the statements of radicals, here and in Europe, 
 seem to many in America today. If the Englishman could not un- 
 derstand the situation at home, where lived thousands of men suffer- 
 ing grievous wrongs, social and legal, and barred from nearly every- 
 thing that made for life, liberty, and estate, how could he under- 
 stand these voices from America, which expressed their grievances 
 — the grievances of a self-conscious people — in language so remote 
 from his comprehension and experience as to seem merely the mouth- 
 ings of theorists and radicals. 
 
 Yet it is not surprising that he did not understand them, for 
 though colonial grievances were real, the arguments based upon 
 them were often purely intellectual, drawn from the writings of 
 Hobbes and Hooker, Selden, Sidney, and Locke, among which those 
 of Hobbes and Sidney had the greatest influence in America. In 
 
 10 
 
many of their resolutions and petitions the colonists pictured society 
 as a political Utopia, unlike anything that ever had been, and far, 
 very far, from "that happy establishment" which Englishmen at 
 home were at that time "enjoying." They apparently had no real 
 knowledge of the small measure of "liberty" accorded to the ma- 
 jority of Englishmen of that day or the still smaller measure ac- 
 corded to the common man in past ages. The more intellectual 
 among them did honestly believe in the contractual origin of the 
 state, in the sacred and inviolable rights of Englishmen, and in the 
 original and inherent rights of all mankind, and that belief, whether 
 fanciful or not, must be reckoned with as among the causes of the 
 Revolution. But middle class Englishmen, who had no difficulty in 
 understanding grievances about trade and grievances about taxation 
 — for both were tangible and concerned what they knew best, 
 money — could make little out of these constitutional claims of the 
 colonists or of this talk of the law of nature and of nations, of 
 reason, and of iGod. iSuch claims and such talk seemed only to 
 threaten that "beautiful form of civil government" from which 
 they derived their influence and under the protection of which they 
 were secured in their offices and possessions. They deemed these 
 claims seditious, because if recognized they would undermine the 
 foundations of the existing political order, and anything, whether 
 in England or America, that endangered the integrity of the British 
 constitution, as established by the "glorious" Revolution, was rank 
 radicalism. Against this immutable dictum of the ruling classes 
 the unprivileged masses of England herself hurled themselves in 
 vain for many a long year; but their fellow radicals in America, 
 further advanced as they were in political education and themselves 
 participators in their own governments three thousand miles away, 
 were in no mood to accept as final such an unyielding attitude of 
 conservatism and privilege and they won their independence in a 
 single act of revolt. 
 
 The final rupture came because the British authorities had but 
 one remedy for radicalism, whether in England or in America, and 
 that remedy was coercion. The age was not one of compromise or 
 conciliation. However much Burke may have pleaded for greater 
 civil and political liberty for America and Pitt may have wished to 
 substitute a policy of friendliness and affection for one of brute 
 force, the mind of the majority in parliament was not favorable to 
 concession. The middle class Britisher in office viewed restlessness 
 and disorder, not as a manifestation of genuine discontent that 
 ought to be relieved, but as an evidence of sinful depravity and con- 
 genital ingratitude toward the best of kings and the wisest of min- 
 istries that ought to be punished as a child was wont to be pun- 
 ished for wrong-doing. Uprisings were to be suppressed by force, 
 outrages to be visited with fine and imprisonment, offenses against 
 those in authority to be dealt with as acts of sedition, public meet- 
 ings to be forbidden as menaces to peace and order, and radical 
 speakers and writers to be treated as demagogues and malcontents. 
 Disobedience was contumacy, opposition defiance, and criticism 
 
 11 
 
libel, "wickedly, scandalously, maliciously, and seditiously uttered 
 or printed to the defamation of his majesty's government." This 
 was the spirit of the eighteenth century government in England and 
 it continued to influence men in authority there for twenty years 
 after that century had closed. 
 
 Such an obstinated adherence to the divine right of constituted 
 authority was met on the other side by charges of oppression and 
 tyranny, which in the colonies were expressed in terms of extreme 
 bitterness and reproach. The radical leaders in America would 
 tolerate no "doctrine of passive obedience or any other doctrine 
 tending to quiet the minds of the people in a tame submission to 
 unjust legislation or control." Should 'Great Britain succeed in her 
 policy then would they and their posterity "be enslaved deep as 
 any Spaniard or African;" with liberty expiring they would become 
 "veritable Israelites in bondage, deprived of happiness and even of 
 life itself." Everywhere there sprang up radical organizations with 
 appropriate symbols — iSons and Daughters of Liberty, with their 
 Liberty Trees and Ensigns of Liberty — whose duty it was to resist 
 to the utmost the "inexorable enemies of American freedom." Many 
 of the Sons of Liberty, dissatisfied with words, resorted to deeds of 
 violence and not only defied the laws of parliament but, believing 
 that their own colonial governments had failed them and were im- 
 potent to meet the necessities of a critical situation, derided also 
 the authority of their own officials and the laws of their own as- 
 semblies. These muscular radicals, like their fellows in every rev- 
 olutionary movement, construing the "law of nature" as a "law of 
 license," gave themselves free rein, inflicting injuries, destroying 
 property, and even threatening the lives of those who resisted or 
 opposed them. If to the colonists the British government seemed 
 tyrannous, we may not wonder that to the middle class Englishman 
 the colonists seemed perversely stubborn and addicted to opinions 
 and practices that were subversive of the most fundamental tenets 
 of their political faith. 
 
 Thus the American Revolution, like nearly all revolutions in his- 
 tory, was an uprising not against a king and his ministers but 
 against a system and a state of mind. The system was not the work 
 of George III, Grenville, Hillsborough, Townshend, or Lord North; 
 it was the result of the Revolution of 1688, which gave power into 
 the hands of the monied middle class of England, under whose rule 
 had been fashioned those rigid and sinister ideas of power and gov- 
 ernment, which permeated the whole official world of king, minis- 
 tries, parliament, council, departments, and boards that had to do 
 with administration at home and abroad. If we are to throw the 
 responsibility for the revolution upon any single body of men, let it 
 rest upon the shoulders of the lawyers — the legal advisers of crown 
 and departments, who in their opinions, expressed in parliament, 
 on the bench, and in written reports, adhered with the utmost strict- 
 ness to the letter of the law and upheld through their advice the 
 policy of no concession. We must say something of course of the 
 obstinacy, prejudice, and personal government of George III, of the 
 
 12 
 
stubbornness and duplicity of Hillsborough, and of the subserviency 
 and good nature of Lord North; but more important than the per- 
 sonal influence of any of these was the refusal of the official and 
 legal mind in England to depart in any essential particular from the 
 rules and principles which governed the exercise of the prerogative, 
 the management of trade and commerce, and the relation of the col- 
 onis to the empire during the years since 1689. Were I writing the 
 Declaration of Independence today, I should indict first the privy 
 councillors and departmental officials who had to do with colonial 
 affairs, and then Lord Mansfield and others of the legal profession 
 upon whose advice these officials frequently acted; and I should not 
 forget to include in the presentment Sir William Blackstone him- 
 self, whose "Commentaries" published in 1768-1769 confirmed the 
 middle class Englishman in his overweening conceit of power and 
 flattered him by expressing entire content with the law and consti- 
 tution of England as it then existed. Blackstone had been lecturing 
 for a number of years and we are told that the king had seen a part 
 of the "Commentaries" in manuscript. I doubt if I should indict 
 George III as an individual. He is made responsible in our Declara- 
 tion for many things with which he personally had nothing to do, and 
 for more than a century and a quarter has been the scapegoat of the 
 Revolution. In reality his personal conduct was but one of many 
 factors in the case and by no means the most important among 
 them. But I should indict the king as the embodiment of the royal 
 prerogative, a power upheld by Blackstone and wielded rather by 
 the king's councillors, secretaries, and executive departments than 
 by himself, and one that was thoroughly disliked and resented by 
 the colonists as interfering with their management of their own 
 affairs. In revolting against the prerogative the colonists were 
 opposing a legal principle rather than a man, but a principle that 
 was maintained in England as a fundamental part of the British 
 constitution. The Declaration of Independence, though directed 
 against the king as a "tyrant" and as one "unfit to be the ruler of a 
 free people" was in fact an indictment of the constitutional power 
 of the prerogative; it was not, because it could not truthfully be, 
 an indictment of a man, whether of German descent or otherwise. 
 
 What conclusions are we to draw from this brief historical 
 analysis that will apply to the furtherance of that better under- 
 standing with Great Britain which the World War has done so much 
 to promote? Mainly two. In the first place an animosity based 
 on a reading of only one side of a controversy is manifestly unjust 
 and irrational. Our writers have hitherto taken the view of the 
 colonial radicals and have made no attempt to discover or to under- 
 stand the thoughts and feelings of those who held conservative 
 and moderate views in America or who upheld the British argu- 
 ment at home. It is one thing for the colonists, in the bitterness of 
 their experiences and angered by the stupid blundering and offensive 
 conduct of British officials, to raise the charge of oppression and 
 tyranny against Great Britain and her ministers; but it is quite 
 another thing for us who live nearly a century and a half after the 
 
 13 
 
event and who have knowledge that our forefathers did not possess, 
 to keep alive this bitterness and allow it to influence our attitude 
 toward the British nation at the present time. Our ancestors fought 
 not for democracy, in any modern sense of the term, but for the 
 right to order their own affairs in their own way. They fought for 
 political and commercial liberty and for freedom from dependence 
 on the British crown and parliament, and as a people which had 
 outgrown the swaddling clothes of colonial subordination they had 
 their justification in fact, and, as they interpreted it, in theory also 
 — the theory of the rights of man. Great Britain had on her side 
 the law and the constitution, for the colonies were colonies and as 
 such were subject to the immutable law of colonial relationship; 
 and there were thousands in America who were satisfied with this 
 relationship and saw in revolution only anarchy and disaster, en- 
 dangering lives and threatening prosperity. Here are three points 
 of view, and among those who held them were many honorable men 
 who were equally convinced of the justness and equity of their 
 positions. Yet who among our American writers has ever honestly 
 made the attempt to analyze the thoughts and opinions of the Amer- 
 ican moderates before the Revolution or to understand the logic of 
 those who argued against the American claims in the British par- 
 liament? He who would comprehend the Revolution in all its bear- 
 ings must study it in the light of the conflicting ideas of the 
 eighteenth century and must fathom the British mind of that pe- 
 riod with as much impartiality and sympathy as he fathoms the 
 minds of Franklin, Adams, and Washington. Until we know why 
 the Loyalists in America and the British official, lawyer, and mem- 
 ber of parliament in England thought as they did and acted as they 
 did, we shall continue to present a picture that is not only provo- 
 cative of wrath against England among those whose minds are easily 
 prejudiced but one that is also distorted and untrue. 
 
 In the second place, the American Revolution was a great cosmic 
 event in the world's history, much too big to admit of wrath over 
 wrongs so long dead that it is high time they were buried and their 
 ghosts laid beyond hope of resurrection. It has been well said that 
 the problems of today are too great to permit us to give more than 
 a passing thought to the quarrels of our great-grandfathers. Our 
 Revolution is not our revolution only; it is a part of the history of 
 liberty, of humanity, and of progress. It represents what Burke 
 once uttered in his fine way: "The question with me is not whether 
 you have a right to render your people miserable but whether it is 
 not your Interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells 
 me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I 
 ought to do." The mistake of the British government lay in its 
 rigid adherence to the letter of the law and the constitution and its 
 failure to realize that sympathy not coercion was a wise policy for 
 governments as well as individuals. The strength of the American 
 cause lay in the fact that the colonists discarded the law and the 
 constitution and responded to the demand that lay within them for 
 a liberty of action which they deemed necessary to their happiness 
 
 14 
 
and prosperity as a people. Herein lies the eternal laws of progress, 
 and herein lies the essential features of a struggle that will go on 
 as long as the world abides — the struggle between those who have 
 and those who have not that which they think they ought to have. 
 The ultimate cause of the American Revolution was not a question 
 of oppression versus slavery — for there was no intentional op- 
 pression on the part of Great Britain or threatened slavery on the 
 side of America. It was a question of freedom from the selfish and 
 uncompromising policy of a governing class; of freedom from the 
 demands of a newly-made empire, which placed the wealth and 
 power of the whole before the interest of any of its parts; of free- 
 dom from the operation of a body of law, which had not kept pace 
 with the mental development and material needs of a colonial 
 world, already in fact, if not in name, a group of semi-independent, 
 self-governing political communities. There is no place in a strug- 
 gle of this kind, which in the end was of enormous profit to Great 
 Britain herself, for the perpetuation of brooding animosities. 
 
 But still more important is it for those who would use these old- 
 time grievances to sharpen the edge of popular dislike of Great 
 Britain to remember that England and the English of the present 
 time are not the England and the English of 1776. The governing 
 and voting element in the United Kingdom of 1919 are in over- 
 whelming numbers the heirs not of the privileged classes of the 
 eighteenth century, but of those unprivileged and neglected classes, 
 which suffered greater social and economic wrongs at the hands of 
 the same selfish and dominant middle class than ever did the inhab- 
 itants of colonial America. iSurely there should be sympathy here 
 not enmity, for both have fought the same fight against a privi- 
 leged oligarchy. We too often forget that in the last hundred years, 
 England has passed through a revolution in her political and social 
 institutions more far-reaching and complete than has any other 
 modern state, and has even outstripped us ourselves in the attain- 
 ment of democracy and social liberty. Yet she has done this with so 
 little outward demonstration as almost to deceive the careless ob- 
 server into believing still in the permanence of British institutions. 
 British institutions are less permanent than our own. There is 
 hardly a single important feature of government, administration, 
 and dispensing of justice, local and central, that has not undergone 
 a reformation so drastic as to constitute a silent revolution of a pro- 
 found and fundamental character. 
 
 'In four great acts of electoral reform, Great Britain has enlarged 
 her voting population from 400,000 to 16,000,000, and has admitted 
 women not only to the local franchise but to parliamentary franchise 
 as well. In the government of her municipalities, her counties, and 
 her parishes, she has taken the control out of the hands of the 
 oligarchic and aristocratic elements and placed it in the hands of 
 the voting constituencies. iShe has entered upon her statute books 
 laws touching sanitation, public health, factories, land monopoly, 
 electoral corruption, old age pensions, national insurance, and the 
 like that place her in the very forefront of the most progressive 
 
 15 
 
countries in the world. She has destroyed the political advantages 
 of privilege, caste, and wealth; ,she has democratized all of her gov- 
 erning bodies and made them everywhere representative of the 
 voting population; she has recognized to a greater extent than we 
 are willing to do the principle of state control of all matters of 
 national welfare and is ready to go much farther as soon as recon- 
 struction has begun. 
 
 Above all else she is now facing an experiment in political organ- 
 ization that is grander and more complex even than the one which 
 the United States was called upon to face in the establishment of a 
 federal republic. Out of the divers and scattered parts of a British 
 empire she is about to create a British imperial commonwealth or 
 a British commonwealth of nations, call it what you will, a union of 
 five self-governing dominions, with India an integral part thereof, 
 and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland a senior part- 
 ner in the enterprise. How it will be accomplished no man can yet 
 say, but one thing is clear, the system, whatever it may be, will 
 combine in a well-adjusted balance a highly developed sense of unity 
 at the center with freedom and equality in all its parts, and be 
 founded as a whole not on might, force, or compulsion, but on moral 
 principles — principles of justice, equity, and equal opportunity for 
 all. This transformation of the British empire into a congeries of 
 autonomous nations, united under an hereditary kingship and a cen- 
 tral imperial conference or cabinet, and bound together by ties of 
 devotion to common ideals of liberty and by confidence in the spirit 
 of fairness, honor, and friendliness governing all, is an event in the 
 history of the world only less significant than the founding of the 
 League of Nations itself. 
 
 When contrasted with these magnificent accomplishments of Great 
 Britain in the field of democracy, just government, and imperial or- 
 ganization, of what value are the petty animosities based on a super- 
 ficial reading of history, on divergencies of material interests, or, 
 what is worse, on trivial dissimilarities in speech and manners, and, 
 with many, on mere personal dislike of insularity, condescension, 
 hyphenated names, and titles, all of which are but the frills and 
 foibles of a great people? Neither the quarrels of the past nor the 
 external dissimilarities of the present must be allowed to destroy 
 the spiritual agreement of the two greatest democratic nations on 
 earth, an agreement resting upon instincts and ideals of moral obli- 
 gation and duty common to both people. In the last analysis the 
 United States took part in the late war, not for Great Britain but 
 with her, because she was defending the same forms of government 
 and the same principles of justice as those in which we believed; 
 and on both sides the men who fought and died were consciously 
 or unconsciously the guardians of the same civilization. Both peo- 
 ples love peace and will fight for it; both are committed to democ- 
 racy, self-government, and the general welfare of mankind; both 
 are possessed of loyalty, courage, and indomitable resolution when 
 a goal is to be reached; and both must work together, as they have 
 lately fought together, not in a spirit of mistrust or jealousy, but as 
 brothers and comrades joined in a common service, the political and 
 social good of all the world. 
 
 16