Englishmen could not believe that such a society could wage a successful
war. Nor could America have done so alone. She owed her ultimate victory
altogether to Washington and France.

It would occupy too much space for me to undertake to analyze, even
superficially, the process by which, after the Seven Years' War,
competition between America and England reached an intensity which kindled
the American Revolution, but, shortly stated, the economic tension arose
thus: As England was then organized, the estates of the English landlords
had to pay two rents, one to the landlord himself, the other to the farmer
who leased his land, and this it could not do were it brought into direct
competition with equally good land which paid but one profit, and which
was not burdened by an excessive cost of transportation in reaching its
market. As freights between England and America fell because of improved
shipping and the greater safety of the seas, England had to have
protection for her food and she proposed to get it thus: If competing
Continental exports could be excluded from America, and, at the same time,
Americans could be prevented from manufacturing for themselves, the
colonists might be constrained to take what they needed from England, at
prices which would enable labor to buy food at a rate which would yield
the double profit, and thus America could be made to pay the cost of
supporting the landlords. As Cobden afterward observed, the fortunes of
England have turned on American competition. A part of these fortunes were
represented by the Parliamentary boroughs which the landlords owned and
which were confiscated by the Reform Bill, and these boroughs were held by
Lord Eldon to be incorporeal hereditaments: as truly a part of the private
property of the gentry who owned them as church advowsons, or the like.
And the gentry held to their law-making power which gave them such a
privilege with a tenacity which precipitated two wars before they yielded;
but this was naught compared to the social convulsion which rent France,