truth. Did you hear much about this at school? Did you ever learn there
that George III had a fake Parliament, largely elected by fake votes,
which did not represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was
autocracy's last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English
democracy which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French
Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England has less
power than the President of the United States? I suppose everybody in the
world who knows the important steps of history knows this--except the
average American. From him it has been concealed by his school histories;
and generally he never learns anything about it at all, because once out
of school, he seldom studies any history again. But why, you may possibly
wonder, have our school histories done this? I think their various au-
thors may consciously or unconsciously have felt that our case against
England was not in truth very strong, that in fact she had been very easy
with us, far easier than any other country was being with its colonies at
that time. The King of France taxed his colonies, the King of Spain
filled his purse, unhampered, from the pockets of Mexico and Peru and
Cuba and Porto Rico--from whatever pocket into which he could put his
hand, and the Dutch were doing the same without the slightest question of
their right to do it. Our quarrel with the mother country and our
breaking away from her in spite of the extremely light rein she was
driving us with, rested in reality upon very slender justification. If
ever our authors read of the meeting between Franklin, Rutledge, and
Adams with General Howe, after the Battle of Long Island, I think they
may have felt that we had almost no grievance at all. The plain truth of
it was, we had been allowed for so long to be so nearly free that we
determined to be free entirely, no matter what England conceded.
Therefore these authors of our school textbooks felt that they needed to
bolster our cause up for the benefit of the young. Accordingly our boys'
and girls' sense of independence and patriotism must be nourished by