loose and misleading analogies with India and the tropical Colonies.
Even a genius like Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled.
Chatham came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak
of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw him back
on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong. It was not fully
understood that there must be a radical difference between the
government of places settled and populated by white colonists and of
places merely exploited by white traders. All the prerogatives of the
Crown and Parliament were theoretically valid over both classes of
dependency, and to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to
be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy. Honest and fair-minded
politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local freedom with
Imperial unity. We have the key now, though we have made no use of it in
Ireland; but most of our forefathers not only had no glimmering of the
truth when the fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war
itself, and remained unenlightened for sixty years more. If the
renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the
negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite certain
that friction would have subsequently arisen on other points. The idea
of what we now know as "responsible government" was unknown. Short of
coercive war, there seemed to be only two altogether logical
alternatives--complete separation and legislative Union. America
obtained the one, Ireland was eventually to undergo the other; but it is
interesting to remember that suggestions, rejected by Franklin as
useless, were made for the representation of the American Colonies in
the English Parliament, just as suggestions for a legislative Union
between Ireland and England appeared intermittently all through the
eighteenth century, long before such a Union was a question of practical
politics.