for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the
revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public
spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking,
vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify,
and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for
self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition
in the case of Ireland. Mr. J.W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining
historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it
can be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts--men of his
own national stock--as the pestilent offspring of an "irreconcilable
faction," which had originally left England deeply imbued with the
doctrines of Republicanism. Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge
retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of
meanness and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and
refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too
contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the
maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is always the "mob," the
"ruffians," the "rabble," of Boston who carry out the reprisals against
the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth
century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of
unscrupulous "agitators." It has been, and remains, an obsession with
the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered
community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want
liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an
artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots--a view
which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American
and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and
tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the
argument for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for
liberty; and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of