I9I2.] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 59 



practice. It was a legal and political impossibility and contrary to 

 common sense. There was no such thing, there never was and there 

 never will be such a thing as a community of Americans voluntarily 

 submitting to the absolute supremacy of a parliament three thousand 

 miles across the Atlantic. The tory majority tried a large part of 

 the whig plan without success. They tried conciliation and found 

 it a failure. They repealed the stamp act and the paint, paper and 

 glass act very early in the controversy. They made no attempt to 

 enforce either act with troops and had scarcely any troops in the 

 country at that time. But the colonists, instead of becoming more 

 submissive, felt more conscious of their power and became more 

 independent. In 1778 the tories offered to repeal practically all 

 objectionable legislation and make a compromise that would be 

 just short of absolute independence ; but the American patriots 

 rejected this ofifer as they had rejected all other attempts at concilia- 

 tion that did not offer absolute independence. 



If the whigs had been in power during the revolution there is 

 no reason to suppose they would have been any more successful 

 in conciliating the Americans than were the tories ; and it is probable 

 that they would not even have attempted to put their idealism into 

 practice. In the Canadian rebellion of 1837 they were in power, 

 but they suppressed that rebellion with a high hand, hanged and 

 banished the ringleaders, did not withdraw troops, and did not rely 

 on voluntary submission. Their idealism in the Revolution was 

 mere minority eloquence. It is one thing to advocate an ideal theory 

 when you are in a hopeless minority and not responsible for results, 

 and quite another thing to put such a theory in force when you are 

 in the majority and in power which you wish to retain. 



The whig partisan policy is such a narrow point of view for 

 writing history, that in order to maintain it and stay within it you 

 must leave out of consideration and either conceal or ignore more 

 than half the evidence and testimony of the eye witnesses and con- 

 temporary documents of the Revolution. You must write the Revo- 

 lution merely as the English whigs saw it, or professed to see it for 

 party purposes. You must omit large masses of evidence that have 

 been found in both America and England. You must ignore the 



