his officers urged him to press on and do it. But the leaves had
already fallen, the bleak winter was near, and Carleton pictured
to himself an army buried deeply in an enemy country and
separated from its base by many scores of miles of lake and
forest. He withdrew to Canada and left Lake Champlain to the
Americans.



CHAPTER III. INDEPENDENCE

Well-meaning people in England found it difficult to understand
the intensity of feeling in America. Britain had piled up a huge
debt in driving France from America. Landowners were paying in
taxes no less than twenty per cent of their incomes from land.
The people who had chiefly benefited by the humiliation of France
were the colonists, now freed from hostile menace and secure for
extension over a whole continent. Why should not they pay some
share of the cost of their own security? Certain facts tended to
make Englishmen indignant with the Americans. Every effort had
failed to get them to pay willingly for their defense. Before the
Stamp Act had become law in 1765 the colonies were given a whole
year to devise the raising of money in any way which they liked
better. The burden of what was asked would be light. Why should
not they agree to bear it? Why this talk, repeated by the Whigs
in the British Parliament, of brutal tyranny, oppression, hired
minions imposing slavery, and so on. Where were the oppressed?
Could any one point to a single person who before war broke out
had known British tyranny? What suffering could any one point to
as the result of the tax on tea? The people of England paid a tax