1912.] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 61 



Then there is much unused evidence about the actual position and 

 services of France, not to mention Spain, and Holland. There are 

 scores of old pamphlets which show the actual arguments ex- 

 changed between the two countries on the constitutional power of 

 Parliament in the argumentative period of the contest 1764- 1774. 

 There is the evidence about the violation of the navigation and 

 trade laws, and about the admiralty courts. All this evidence our 

 standard histories fail to bring to light and explain. 



They give us no adequate understanding of the dozen acts of 

 Parliament which the patriot colonists wished repealed. They 

 never explain the full meaning of that demand of the colonists that 

 England should never keep soldiers in a colony in time of peace, 

 except by the consent of the colony, that England should not change 

 or amend a colonial charter except by the consent of the colony. 

 They do not even explain, they hardly even notice the demand by 

 the patriots that Parliament should have no authority in the colonies 

 or in relation to them except to regulate ocean commerce. They do 

 not explain what the colonists meant when they said that they were 

 willing to be ruled by the king alone. They do not compare these 

 demands with the modern British colonial system to see whether 

 any of them have, in modern times, been accepted by England as 

 proper methods of colonial government. 



The most curious fact about the whig and Annua! Register 

 method of writing our history is that in the end the English tories 

 accepted it as the safest and best way of describing the old contro- 

 versy. Most of the evidence relating to the Revolution was a very 

 serious matter for Englishmen to handle, no matter whether their 

 political views were tory or whig. England still had colonies, ex- 

 pected to have more and to go on building up a great and obedient 

 imperial empire. The whigs in their way believed in that empire 

 as much as the tories and gladly accepted all the profits and advan- 

 tages of it. Would it be wise for English writers, whether tory, 

 whig or " impartial," to tell the English people that the American 

 patriot party had from the beginning hated and detested what is to 

 this day the foundation principle of the British empire, namely, the 

 supremacy of Parliament as absolute and omnipotent in every colony 



