Broad River, but crossed the river somewhat lower down on account of a canoe being there, and thence to the Pacolet River, which he crossed. The family obtained a vacant tract of four hundred acres and settled in Union country. When the arguments against and in favour of the Stamp Act came up, you may remember the distances, the paucity of settlement, the rivers and conditions of transport, to which it was intended to apply.

The population of some million and a half or more was divided as follows (Social and Economic Forces in American History, 1913), the statistics being of the year 1689: New Hampshire, 5,000; Massachusetts, Plymouth and Maine, 50,000; Rhode Island, 4,000; Connecticut, 17,000 to 20,000; New York, 18,000 to 20,000; New Jersey, some 14,000 or less; Pennsylvania and Delaware, 12,000; Maryland, 30,000; Virginia, 50,000 to 60,000; North Carolina, 2,000 to 3,000; South Carolina, 3,000. There must have been a great increase between 1698 and 1760. At the accession of King George III. the population of Great Britain was probably somewhere about seven millions.

Between all these distant communities there was but little social intercourse. They had been planted by bands of emigrants from various parts of Europe under circumstances of origin, varying greatly in point of time, of political or theological character. They looked not to each other but across the ocean to Europe, their "spiritual home," from which were imported almost all their manufactured goods. The difficulties of transport were so great that travel was as far as possible by sea or, for up-country journeys, by river. Where it was necessary to go by land the pace was very slow. A loyalist force in a march of four miles in the North-west of South Carolina in September, 1770, crossed one creek nineteen times. (Allaire's Diary in Draper's King's Mountain and its Heroes.) The roads were few and very bad, and the ox cart the usual mode of conveyance, as horses, being expensive, were little used. There were few towns, almost entirely in the North, containing about five per cent. of the population, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston (South Carolina) being the chief cities. Virginia, wholly rural, dependent upon her tobacco planting along the creeks and rivers, was a country of large isolated plantations.

It took four days to go by stage from Boston to New York, and three from New York to Philadelphia. The instruction in schools over such a vast area with an indefinite Western boundary was, of course, very imperfect and hard to reach. Harvard College had been founded in 1636. Various efforts had been made by public-spirited British Governors, such as Nicholson and Spotswood, and British Churchmen, to advance education, but the field was too vast, and the character of the people too wild for quick progress. In journalism the country was well in advance of Scotland. The Boston News Letter began in 1704, and by 1719 there were newspapers in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. In 1731 Franklin, who had been born in 1706, founded a public subscription library in Philadelphia. In 1739 the religious revival under Whitefield, so well suited to the pioneer, stirred the conscience of the people, the discontented and criminals with whom for a hundred years all the laws and influences of the British had tended to fill America.

The American editor of Social and Economic Forces in American History sums up well, I think, the situation created by management of the colonies from a distance of three thousand miles. "After a century of great laxity towards the colonists -a century in which the colonists were favoured by political privileges shared by no other people of that age; after the environment had established new social conditions, and remoteness and isolation had created a local and individual hatred of restraint; after the absence of traditions had made possible the institution of representation by population, and self-government had taken a new meaning in the world; after a great gulf had been fixed between the social, political and economic institutions of the two parts of the British Empire-only then did the British Government enter upon a policy intended to make the Empire a unity." It was too late. Walpole and Newcastle had encouraged their isolation; they were already independent in spirit.

CHAPTER XI

THE QUARREL WITH THE AMERICAN COLONIES

i. No Taxation without Representation.-Taxation for what and by whom? Adam Smith, expressing the views of the most progressive thinkers of the eighteenth century, says: According to the system of national liberty the sovereign has only three duties to attend to: three duties of great importance indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings : first, the duty of protecting as far as possible every member of the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting as far as possible every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual or small number of individuals to erect or maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than save it to a great society."

The first-protection from other independent societies—plays the chief part in human history; for it is never, with all due respect to the protocols of the League of Victors, quite certain which of the independent societies was the aggressor or, in other words, began the theeing and thouing which leads to war. This duty, at great cost to the British peoples, their Kings had faithfully performed. In wars both necessary and most uncalledfor, the British fleets had protected the colonies lying along the long stretch of the Atlantic coast from European rivals; and British armies, adorned with periwigs, had tramped in heavy Flanders uniforms through the forests and across the rivers of the Continent to oppose the other European peoples. The second-the substitution of law for force, the first and chief evidence of internal civility in a society-had been faithfully effected by the King, so far as it was possible to influence from a distance of three thousand miles over stormy seas a wild

population historically impatient of control. The third-all those public amenities and institutions which are necessary for national growth and progress-had been carefully fostered by the mother country for the colony.

Now it is a practical fact of life that no ruler of a society ever performs these duties without calling upon the community benefitted by them to contribute to the expense incurred by the act. That the people should be taxed in return for these benefits is of the essence of community life. But, although all are anxious to have the benefits of protection and public works, no one is willing to pay for these if it can be avoided. What guarantee shall I have, they say, that the money which I pay shall be spent for my advantage? Who will represent my interests in the disposal of the money which I am called upon to pay?

It is too often forgotten that at the time of the American Revolution the answer to this question outside of Great Britain would be that the peoples were duly represented by the King and his ministers alone, and that these, without any consultation with the people, were entitled to lay taxes on them for the public use. The imminent dangers to which the nations of Western Europe were exposed from invasion by their neighbours inclined them to acquiesce in the taxation necessary for the support of armies, by which they laid themselves open to plunder and oppression.

The islanders, more secure behind their sea barrier, having acquired an habitual dislike of military power, had set themselves to limit the means of acquiring it, by making the collection of taxes necessary for its support the subject of a grant by the people to the King according to laws made by the whole community in a Parliament supposed to be composed of their representatives.

So far, however, was the House of Commons from being a representative body, that some of its members represented boroughs put up for sale, a great number were elected, like Pitt at Old Sarum, for a deserted village, by one or two nominees of a great landowner. Great towns were altogether unrepresented; large districts were bought or owned by the great men.

Of the manner in which men were chosen for the Parliament of George I. in 1714 Lady Mary writes: "There is not any

gentleman or tradesman disengaged at this time; they are treating every night. I believe there is hardly a borough unengaged. Perhaps it will be the best way to deposit a certain sum in some friend's hands and buy some little Cornish borough." In December, 1767, Lord Chesterfield writes to his son: "In one of our conversations I desired Lord Chatham to secure you a seat in the new Parliament; he assured me he would. . . Since that I have heard no more of it, which made me look out for some venal borough; and I spoke to a borough jobber, and offered £2,500 for a secure seat in Parliament; but he laughed at my offer, and said that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for the rich East and West Indians had secured them all, at the rate of £3,000 at least ; but many at £4,000, and two or three that he knew at £5,000.

If the American looked to Ireland he found that, "The Crown created boroughs wholesale to such an extent that out of 300 members 215 were elected by boroughs and manors, and of these 176 by individual patrons. In 1784 it was stated that 50 M.P.s were elected by 60 individuals (Lecky, History of Ireland.)

Bad as it was, the system had some advantages; it acted to admit young men of merit, such as Pitt or Burke, who could not have been elected; it was no more hostile to freedom than a Parliament elected by wide suffrage, which is equally or even more jealous of its privileges; and it represented property and the qualities necessary to gain and keep it. In this respect it was more representative than our present franchise.*

The numbers in all these cases, whether of the minority electors who returned the member or of the majority who opposed him, represent practically neither wealth nor intelligence. Nor does it, in default of these, represent any