the Home Government showed a blindness to what was going on under their
very eyes which would be incomprehensible if we did not know by
experience that it is the invariable result of irresponsible rule over
white men, whether at home or abroad. If, without the presence of race
distinctions, it needed Parliamentary reform in England itself to force
the ruling class to study with real sympathy the needs, character, and
desires of their own people, naturally the same ruling class, sending
out its own members or dependents to America, obtained the most
grotesquely distorted notions of what Americans were and what they
wanted or resented. "Their office," wrote Franklin of the Governors,[13]
"makes them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being
conscious that they are hated, they become malicious. Their malice urges
them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to
Administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to
encourage the use of severity) as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly.
Government believes all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance
its officers," etc. The same spirit pervades the official correspondence
of even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and
ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were at all
times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension which needed only
skilful fomentation by her English rulers to ruin all hopes of
reconciliation and unity. That phase was to come after the first Irish
victories. For the present the system--for it can scarcely be called a
policy--was to irritate all Irishmen and all Americans alike,
irrespective of creed, class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each
side of the Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people.

The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. Holland in his
"Imperium et Libertas," is the confusion of political ideas in regard to
the status of white dependencies--a confusion greatly augmented by