common cause with their political opponents in defence of the
Union between England and Ireland. Only the other day England
sent 200,000 men into the field south of the equator to fight out
the question whether South Africa should develop as a Federation
of British Colonies or as an independent Afrikander United
States. In all these cases the Unionists who were detached from
their parties were called renegades, as Burgoyne was. That, of
course, is only one of the unfortunate consequences of the fact
that mankind, being for the most part incapable of politics,
accepts vituperation as an easy and congenial substitute. Whether
Burgoyne or Washington, Lincoln or Davis, Gladstone or Bright,
Mr. Chamberlain or Mr. Leonard Courtney was in the right will
never be settled, because it will never be possible to prove that
the government of the victor has been better for mankind than the
government of the vanquished would have been. It is true that the
victors have no doubt on the point; but to the dramatist, that
certainty of theirs is only part of the human comedy. The
American Unionist is often a Separatist as to Ireland; the
English Unionist often sympathizes with the Polish Home Ruler;
and both English and American Unionists are apt to be
Disruptionists as regards that Imperial Ancient of Days, the
Empire of China. Both are Unionists concerning Canada, but with a
difference as to the precise application to it of the Monroe
doctrine. As for me, the dramatist, I smile, and lead the
conversation back to Burgoyne.

Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga made him that occasionally
necessary part of our British system, a scapegoat. The
explanation of his defeat given in the play is founded on a
passage quoted by De Fonblanque from Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord