III was a tyrant, his ministers were scoundrels, and the British
people were lost to every sense of virtue. The evil of it is
that, for a posterity which listened to no other comment on the
issues of the Revolution, such utterances, instead of being
understood as passing expressions of party bitterness, were taken
as the calm judgments of men held in reverence and awe. Posterity
has agreed that there is nothing to be said for the coercing of
the colonies so resolutely pressed by George III and his
ministers. Posterity can also, however, understand that the
struggle was not between undiluted virtue on the one side and
undiluted vice on the other. Some eighty years after the American
Revolution the Republic created by the Revolution endured the
horrors of civil war rather than accept its own disruption. In
1776 even the most liberal Englishmen felt a similar passion for
the continued unity of the British Empire. Time has reconciled
all schools of thought to the unity lost in the case of the
Empire and to the unity preserved in the case of the Republic,
but on the losing side in each case good men fought with deep
conviction.



CHAPTER II. BOSTON AND QUEBEC

Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the
realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it
was an advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a
regular, for he faced conditions which required an elastic mind.
The force besieging Boston consisted at first chiefly of New
England militia, with companies of minute-men, so called because