I9I2.] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 71 



for England; "her glorious records of a thousand years," and her 

 dominion "on which the sun shall never set." If Gladstone had 

 been alive in 1776 he and Washington would have settled the whole 

 difificulty amicably, the English speaking race would not have been 

 divided, and the United States would in some wonderfully sweet 

 way have remained British colonies and part of the British empire, 

 the great civilizer of the world. That is the keynote of his history; 

 and it is all written within that limitation. No one has so glorified 

 and enlarged the old whig and Annual Register idea. 



He limits himself and narrows his point of view still more by 

 assigning the obstinacy of the king and his love of personal govern- 

 ment as the cause of all the difficulty. The king deceived and forced 

 the ministry, Parliament and the English people, and kept them 

 deceived and forced during eleven years of argument and eight years 

 of war. 



This one-man explanation of great political events is a cheap and 

 easy historical device of very wide application. It is very dramatic 

 and from a literary point of view, very telling and interesting. Fiske 

 varies it and makes it more dramatic by assuring us that the person 

 who put the wickedness into the head of George III. was Charles 

 Townshend. 



That is a very pretty and interesting touch, to have Mephistoph- 

 eles whispering in the ear of the one man. Botta, who also had 

 the one-man idea, said that the devil who did the whispering was 

 Lord Bute. And, indeed, the devil might be varied indefinitely, 

 because there were so many people suggesting those ideas at that 

 time. The editor of the Boston Gazette may have been the devil ; 

 for Townshend's main idea can be found in the pages of that journal 

 long before Townshend promulgated it. If Mr. Fiske and his fol- 

 lowers will admit that there were many million devils comprising the 

 majority of the Parliament and people of England together with the 

 loyalists in America all whispering and some talking very loud for 

 the encouragement of George III., the one-man theory will become 

 comparatively harmless. 



If modern comprehensive investigation aided by improved libra- 

 ries and collections has established anything, it is that the prominent 



