[falconer] 1776 and 1914— BRITISH colonial action 245 



gladly imported its manufactures from England and sent her tobacco 

 in return. Neither incompatibility nor self-interest could have in- 

 duced him to break away from England and join hands with democratic 

 and puritan New England which hated Toryism and Episcopacy. 

 Intensity of conviction alone carried him through years of great 

 distress when he had to endure disappointments and disloyalty at 

 the hands of various States and Congress. The winter at Valley 

 Forge tested him to the utmost; again and again he saved the situation 

 by his masterful character and dominating will. But his actions are 

 not to be accounted for by mere stubbornness. He was really in 

 spirit a great Englishman like Pym, Hampden, or Milton, who would 

 take their country into war rather than abandon a principle 

 of liberty, and his principle was similar to that of the English Civil 

 War as stated by Ludlow: "The question in dispute between the 

 King's party and us was, as I apprehended, whether the King should 

 govern as a God by his will, and the nation be governed by force 

 like beasts, or whether the people should be governed by laws made 

 by themselves and live under a government derived from their own 

 consent." (Quoted in Firth, The Parallel Between the English and 

 American Civil Wars, p. 6). By the course of events the right of 

 imposing taxation had come to be regarded as the supreme proof 

 of a self-governing community, and until this right had been en- 

 trusted to them their status as freemen was not complete. 



We turn to the other half of the English-speaking world. The 

 creation of the American Commonwealth of set purpose and with a 

 rigid constitution to which the legislative action of Congress must 

 conform, is quite different from the rise and character of the present 

 British Empire. 



When the thirteen colonies revolted England was ruled at home 

 by incompetent politicians and led in the field by feeble generals. 

 It seemed as though she must do the wrong thing on every occasion. 

 It was the Colonists not the British Government who were defending 

 a true principle of genuine English political development. 



The years that followed were among the darkest of England's 

 history. Many thought that her day was near its close. Her greatest 

 poet, Wordsworth, read the causes of her trouble in domestic condi- 

 tions; and yet in the worst moments he never lost hope in her because 

 he knew that the heart of the people was sound, that in it was a power, 

 a spirit, 



"whether on the wing 



Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind 



Within its awful caves." 

 But he scores the leaders, writing many years afterwards in 1810: 



Sec. I & II, Sig. 17 



