independence, and the American colonists renounced connection with the
mother country, similar effects were produced by the same cause. In each
case English colonists revolted against England's sovereignty, because
it meant the privilege of Englishmen who dwelt in Great Britain to
curtail the rights and hamper the trade of Englishmen who dwelt abroad.
For the iniquitous restrictions on the trade of Ireland, which are
morally by far the most blameworthy of the wrongs inflicted by England
upon Irishmen, were not precisely the acts of deliberate selfishness
which they seem to modern critics. The grievance under which Ireland
suffered was in character the same as the grievances in respect of trade
inflicted on the American colonies. Yet but for the insane attempt to
subject the colonists to direct taxation by the English Parliament the
War of Independence might have been long deferred. Even the sufferers
from a vicious commercial policy did not see its essential iniquity, and
it is hardly a subject for wonder that a generation of Englishmen who
supposed themselves to gain greatly by controlling or extinguishing the
colonial or the Irish trade should not have recognised the full iniquity
of a policy which in itself hardly seemed intolerable to many of those
colonists who endured the wrong. Still less can we be surprised that
Englishmen a century ago, amid a world where the idea of human equality
was not as yet recognised, should have failed to perceive what many
Englishmen it may be suspected will hardly admit at present, that to
most men equality, i.e. the treatment of all subjects by their
government on similar principles, seems a form of justice, and that the
multitude will tolerate restrictions on their freedom far more easily
than offences against their sense of equality. No one will care to deny
that French Governments have at all periods been far more despotic than
the Government of England; but few persons who have given the matter a
thought can deny that France has shown a power quite unknown to
Englishmen of attaching to herself by affection countries which she has