244 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



even Virginia took fire once the principle of ci vil liberty was struck hard. 

 On being taxed by the British Parliament the colonies felt that if 

 they submitted they would be guilty of renouncing their freedom. 

 The question at issue was one of political status, the right not to be 

 taxed without representation which they believed was the supreme 

 privilege of Englishmen and was the touchstone of political liberty. 

 "In nearly every respect (the Colonists) governed themselves under 

 the shadow of the British dominion with a liberty which was hardly 

 equalled in any other portion of the civilized globe. Political power 

 was incomparably less corrupt than at home, and real constitutional 

 liberty was flourishing in the English Colonies when nearly all Euro- 

 pean countries and all other Colonies were despotically governed." 

 (Lecky). It was not a matter of the amount of money involved in 

 the taxing; that was trivial indeed in comparison with the cost of a 

 war, and to have shed blood for the aggregate value of the taxes 

 would have been a crime of the first order from which a man like 

 Washington would have shrunk in horror. Acton has remarked in 

 one of his letters which have been recently published: — "No dogma in 

 politics is more certain than this; Liberty was at the point of death in 

 1773, and it was America that gave it life . . , The problem pre- 

 sented by the Americans was at bottom this — Should the existence of 

 one's country, one's family be risked, one's fortune be ruined -and 

 one's children exposed to death, blood be shed in floods, all that be 

 renounced which has been established by authority and sanctified 

 by custom for an idea which is nowhere written down, which is purely 

 idealistic, speculative and new, in contradiction with the constitution, 

 which has no religious sanction for itself, nor legal credit, which is 

 unknown to all order and legislators. The affirmative answer is the 

 Revolution, or as we say Liberalism." 



Washington, "the Father of his country," was a conservative, 

 who felt that the action of the King, Townshend, Grenville and North 

 was a breach of law, that they were overturning the foundations of 

 freedom and that the defence of the right was of necessity placed in 

 the keeping of the colonists. This also was Burke's view: "Those 

 who have and who hold to the foundations of common liberty whether 

 on this or on your side of the ocean, we consider as the true and only 

 Englishmen." The leadership of Washington reveals in large part 

 the deepest motive in the Revolution. He belonged to Virginia, was 

 an aristocrat, an Episcopalian, a wealthy slave-owner, without special 

 sympathy for democracy, and possessing friends in the finest English 

 society. He must have been strongly attached to England, nor was 

 he disturbed by the trade difiiculties between the northern Colonies 

 and the Mother-land, for he was a great landowner in a State that 



