conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole Revolution,
that Washington not only knew his countrymen, who were Mr. Fortescue's
countrymen, better than Arnold, but was a better representative of their
dominant characteristics.[15]

Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, and we
know the source of that prepossession, a passionate love of the British
Army, which does him great honour, while it distorts his political
vision. I should not refer at such length to his view of the American
War were it not that, whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for
discussion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predominant
philosophy. Historical sense seems to vanish, and the same savage racial
bias supervenes, whether the unruly people concerned are absolutely
consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a
general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce
under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under
coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the
dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the
leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist
minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want
what by all the constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and
the correspondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a
conviction solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while
making that very violence an argument for the depravity of those who use
it, and a pretext for denying them self-government.

All this is terribly true in the case of Ireland, and when I next revert
to the American continent, the reader will observe that the same ideas
were entertained towards Canada, the only white Colony left to the
British Empire after the loss of the thirteen States.