self-contradiction and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible
account of a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was
"factitious," initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and
sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he contends,
was "the work of a small but energetic and well-organized minority
towards which the mass of the people, when not directly hostile, was
mainly indifferent." Happily, Mr. Fortescue's candour as an historian of
facts gives us the clue to this strange tangle. We find no evidence that
the sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, and
whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with ease in
co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in fact, a majority,
nor that they were either better or worse men, or more or less ardent
patriots, than the mutinous minority, or the British regular soldiers
themselves. Their loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is
sometimes interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious;
they are given to desertion, like Washington's troops, like Lee's and
Grant's troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops and like all
Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine war with the duty of
keeping their homes and business afloat. We find, too, that a
counter-current of desertion flows from the British, and still more from
the German, regulars, also a natural enough phenomenon in what was
virtually a civil war for liberty; so that "General Greene was often
heard to say that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with
British soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of
America." And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case,
exultingly quotes against the Americans "the cynical Benedict Arnold,
who knew his countrymen," and who said: "Money will go farther than arms
in America." Yet Arnold, whose opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue
accepts as correct and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter,
but a perjured military traitor of the most despicable kind. We may