_Ripe to wed with Liberty_; Looking at the American War of Independence
without party-passion and distortion, as should now at least be possible
to Englishmen, the main cause must be acknowledged to lie simply in the
growth and geographical position of the Colonies, which had brought them
to the age of natural liberty, and had begun to fit them for its
exercise:--facts which it was equally in accordance with nature that the
Fatherland should fail to perceive. For the causes which gradually
determined American resistance we must look, (as regards us), not to the
blundering English legislation after 1760,--to the formalism of
Grenville, the subterfuges of Franklin,--but to the whole course of our
commercial policy since the Revolution: As regards the Colonies, to the
extinction of the power of France in America by the Treaty of Paris in
1763: (Lecky: ch. v; Mahon: ch. xliii).
The Stamp Act of 1765 brought home, indeed, to a rapidly-developing
people the supremacy claimed across the Atlantic; but the obnoxious
taxation which it imposed, (despite the splendid sophistry of Chatham),
cannot be shown to differ essentially from the trade restrictions and
monopolies enacted in long series after 1688, as the result of the
predominance obtained at the Revolution by the commercial classes in this
country, and which so far as 1765 the colonies openly recognized as
legal.
Going, however, beyond these minor motives, the true cause was
unquestionably that the time for separate life, for America to be
herself, had come. This was a crisis which home-legislation could do
little to create or to avert: a natural law, which only worked itself out
ostensibly by political manoeuvres and military operations, so
ill-managed as to be rarely creditable to either side;--and, regarded
simply as a 'struggle for existence,' is, in the eye of impartial
history, hardly within the scope of praise or censure.
But it was a neutrally tinted background like this, which could most
effectually bring into full relief the great qualities of the one great
man who was prominent in the conflict.
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