America took her own road and worked out her own magnificent destiny.
Most of us now honour Washington and the citizen troops he led. We say
they fought, as Hampden and their English forefathers fought, for a
sublime ideal, freedom, and that they were chips of the old block. But
let not distance delude us into supposing that they were without the
full measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer
considerable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of smothered
revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven years of open war
which preceded their victory. Washington's genius carried them safely
through the ordeal of the war, and the still more exacting ordeal of
political reconstruction after the war, but it is well known how nearly
he and his staunchest supporters failed. The Revolution, like all
revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human
nature. Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for
law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establishment
of good laws. As I have already indicated, the dislike and the
systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period
when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably
sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension. However true that
may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more
heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any
other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar
conditions. Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always
seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake
cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of
character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case
against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has,
at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa,
and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their
faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material