spark of revolution is once lighted, when resistance to the law has
once commenced, things are carried to a point far beyond that dreamed
of by the first leaders.

Those who commenced the French Revolution were moderate men who
desired only that some slight check should be placed on the arbitrary
power of the king--that the people should be relieved in some slight
degree from the horrible tyranny of the nobles, from the misery and
wretchedness in which they lived. These just demands increased step
by step until they culminated in the Reign of Terror and the most
horrible scenes of bloodshed and massacre of modern times.

Men like Washington and Franklin and Adams may have desired only that
the colonists should be free from imperial taxation, but the popular
voice went far beyond this. Three years earlier wise counsels in the
British Parliament might have averted a catastrophe and delayed for
many years the separation of the colonies from their mother country.
At the time the march began from Boston to Concord the American
colonists stood virtually in armed rebellion. The militia throughout
New England were ready to fight. Arms, ammunition, and military
stores were collected in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The cannon
and military stores belonging to the Crown had been carried off by
the people, forty cannon being seized in Rhode Island alone. Such
being the case, it is nonsense to speak of the fray at Lexington as
the cause of the Revolutionary War. It was but the spark in the
powder. The magazine was ready and primed, the explosion was
inevitable, and the fight at Lexington was the accidental incident
which set fire to it.

The efforts of American writers to conceal the real facts of the