of 1688 was fading from memory. The English Government of that day
rested upon privilege and corruption at the base, surmounted by a king
bent on despotism, but fortunately too weak to accomplish any design
either of good or ill. An empire still outwardly sound was rotting at
the core. The privilege which had found Great Britain so complacent
sought to establish itself over the Colonies. The purpose of the
patriots was resistance to tyranny. Pitt and Burke and Lord Camden in
England recognized this, and, loving liberty, approved the course of the
Colonies. The Tories here, loving privilege, approved the course of the
Royal Government. Bunker Hill meant that the Colonies would save
themselves and saving themselves save the mother country for liberty.
The war was not inevitable. Perhaps wars are never inevitable. But the
conflict between freedom and privilege was inevitable. That it broke out
in America rather than in England was accidental. Liberty, the rights of
man against tyranny, the rights of kings, was in the air. One side must
give way. There might have been a peaceful settlement by timely
concessions such as the Reform Bill of England some fifty years later,
or the Japanese reforms of our own times, but wanting that a collision
was inevitable. Lacking a Bunker Hill there had been another Dunbar.

The eighteenth century was the era of the development of political
rights. It was the culmination of the ideas of the Renaissance. It was
the putting into practice in government of the answer to the long
pondered and much discussed question, "What is right?" Custom was giving
way at last to reason. Class and caste and place, all the distinctions
based on appearance and accident were giving way before reality. Men
turned from distinctions which were temporal to those which were
eternal. The sovereignty of kings and the nobility of peers was
swallowed up in the sovereignty and nobility of all men. The inequal in
quantity became equal in quality.