of the flagellation neurosis who are so anxious to revive that
discredited sport. His military reports are very clever as
criticisms, and are humane and enlightened within certain
aristocratic limits, best illustrated perhaps by his declaration,
which now sounds so curious, that he should blush to ask for
promotion on any other ground than that of family influence. As a
parliamentary candidate, Burgoyne took our common expression
"fighting an election" so very literally that he led his
supporters to the poll at Preston in 1768 with a loaded pistol in
each hand, and won the seat, though he was fined 1,000 pounds,
and denounced by Junius, for the pistols.

It is only within quite recent years that any general recognition
has become possible for the feeling that led Burgoyne, a
professed enemy of oppression in India and elsewhere, to accept
his American command when so many other officers threw up their
commissions rather than serve in a civil war against the
Colonies. His biographer De Fonblanque, writing in 1876,
evidently regarded his position as indefensible. Nowadays, it is
sufficient to say that Burgoyne was an Imperialist. He
sympathized with the colonists; but when they proposed as a
remedy the disruption of the Empire, he regarded that as a step
backward in civilization. As he put it to the House of Commons,
"while we remember that we are contending against brothers and
fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in
this crisis for the fate of the British Empire." Eighty-four
years after his defeat, his republican conquerors themselves
engaged in a civil war for the integrity of their Union. In 1886
the Whigs who represented the anti-Burgoyne tradition of American
Independence in English politics, abandoned Gladstone and made