to propose the measure of imposing taxes on the colonies and to force into execution the collection of them? The whole system of the State government and interwoven interest of the colonies has gone too far for that to be practicable. Does it mean by any mode of policy to unite this system which is, in fact, interwoven and incorporated into the very being of the British Empire? I am afraid not. Matters are not yet gone far enough to point out the practicability and necessity of such political union."

He realizes what is equally true to-day, that the King and not Parliament is the only tie between any two parts of the Empire. "Let the provinces," he says, " do their own taxing, or let it be considered as a service which the crown requires of them, and for which, without the interposition of Parliament, it makes the proper requisitions." It might have proved to be a good solution of the trouble. But any power to the crown was the last thing desired by the Whig ministries of that day.

He sees the danger of the windy theories of Burke and others about rights, and urges the House to leave general theories alone and deal with the present facts. "Let this matter of right rest upon the declaratory law and say no more about it. It may be understood that it is in the same words as that respecting Ireland, that it shall stand in the same line of administration" (i.e., not be enforced). "Continue to exercise the power which you have already exercised of laying subsidies, imposts and duties; but exercise this, as you have always hitherto done, with prudence and moderation and directed by the spirit of commercial wisdom. Do nothing which may bring into discussion 'questions of right' which must become 'mere articles of faith.' Go into no innovations in practice, and suffer no encroachments on government." They were vain words, falling on unwilling ears.

vi. The British Parliament and Customs Duties.-After the repeal of the Stamp Act any idea of internal taxation appears to have been given up. But external customs duties were not yet opposed. The Americans themselves had drawn the distinction between internal taxation and the customs duties. "I never," said Franklin," heard any objection to the right

of laying duties to regulate commerce." "However they may reason as to internal taxes," says Pownall," their arguments do not go beyond low-water mark." Successful rebellion taught the Americans to ignore the distinction. Henceforth all duties to the mother country were to be resisted; if it was right to resist internal taxation, such resistance equally applied to customs duties laid upon a nation of smugglers.

When Chatham formed his last ministry, the collection which Burke described as a very curious show but unsafe to stand on (he was not asked himself), Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, relying on this distinction, put duties on various imports, painters' colours, glass, paper and tea. They were resisted, as had been the Stamp Act, and with the same effect, all being withdrawn by the Grafton ministry except the duty on tea, retained for the benefit of the East India Company. "This second repeal," says Ramsay, "increased the confidence of the colonists and encouraged them to continue the opposition to parliamentary taxation." The same violence and outrages of mob law which greeted both rested on the same cause of complaint, the system of monopoly of trade which subordinated the interests of the Americans to those of the British merchants.

So long as the grievance remained the riotous acts persisted, because the men who controlled the assemblies and the militia were the men who committed the riots. A correspondent, writing on December 18th, 1755, to Mr. Conway, divides the rioters' leaders into classes: the lawyers, who assumed the direction of the assembly (for the most part of common farmers) by their influence with family affairs; and the merchants, of whom he says, "many have suddenly risen from the lowest rank of the people to considerable fortunes, and chiefly in the last war by illicit trade; they abhor every limitation of trade and duties, and therefore gladly go into every measure whereby they hope to have trade free." (P.H., Vol. XVI., p. 121). Pownall, pleading for the colonials in 1774 (P.H., Vol. XVII., p. 1182), says, "I look upon this to be the act of the mob and not of the people, and wait but a little, it will regulate itself." But Burke, on the other hand, tells you (ibid., 1182) the whole meeting in the town of Boston consisted of some six or seven hundred men of the first rank and opulent fortune

R

in the place; the proceedings were conducted with the utmost decency. He said this was not a meeting of mean persons, but that the acts of resistance were all countenanced by universal consent. Believe which you please, the man who had been Governor of Massachusetts or the friend of Wilkes.

Whichever it was, whether the beastly acts were of the mob or of men of rank and opulent fortune, the fact remains that they received the support of the small clans of Whigs who formed the opposition to the government, and that these clans, by their senseless opposition, were mainly responsible for the catastrophe. Lord North truly said, in 1769, of the opposition accusing the ministers: "The charge of alienating the affection of the people from their sovereign must come with a very ill grace from the leaders of the opposition, who are incessantly labouring to persuade them that he does not deserve their affection by speeches and writings, beyond all example virulent and inflammatory, from those factious spirits, the only genuine malcontents in the kingdom, who run from place to place, collect a crowd together, and abuse the credulous people by abusing alike His Majesty and his ministers. If His Majesty's subjects are disaffected, these trumpeters of sedition have produced the disaffection." In April, 1771, in opening his budget he said, "Trade flourishes in all parts of the kingdom; American disputes are settled (this was apparently the fact owing to a threat of war with Spain); and there is nothing to interrupt the peace and prosperity of the nation but the discontents, which a desperate faction is fomenting by the basest falsehoods and with the most iniquitous views," to which the Report adds (P.H., XVII., 165), " Messrs. Dowdeswell, Burke, Barré and Cornwall took their revenge for his charge against them by menaces and invective."

I have spent on this dull and rather pointless incident of the American Revolution space out of all proportion to its historical importance. I have considered it necessary to do so because, since King George's time, the history of his reign, to quote Sir William Anson, has too often been written in the style of a political pamphlet. The historians who so treat it have been assisted in obtaining almost a monopoly of writing such history by the abiding influence in all social and political

affairs of ideas then current concerning liberty, which they professed to consider applicable to this American imbroglio.

Such ideas were early the subject both of discussion and action in relation to commerce, national and international; they were applied in their most extreme forms to politics by the French and all other revolutionaries of Western Europe; and they have since coloured in a more sober fashion all our views of life. They were quite new to that time, and very few public men appear to have seen their trend in the future or their want of relation to the past.

The application of these ideas to the American Revolution by writers who have accepted the theories of a small quarrelsome minority of Whig malcontents has resulted in a variety of distortions which are dangerous teaching even as woven in our history of to-day.

This school has imagined a personal (i.e., an arbitrary) government by King George which did not at any time exist; and a Tory party to correspond, with which the King was supposed to associate himself, ignoring the fact that none of his four great ministers, Bute, Chatham, North and Pitt, except so far as Chatham leant on the old Whigs, had any Party association. They leave to one side wholly the responsibility of the various Whig factions who managed, up to 1770, for the confusion of policies, and the disappearance of the Tories as a political force after 1745. The only element of truth in these allegations lay in the undoubted fact that King George would not permit himself to be the creature of the great Whig houses only, as his two predecessors were, and insisted, as a constitutional king, on choosing his ministers regardless of their party leanings. It was in the course of this struggle between the King and the Whig oligarchy that the American colonies rebelled and parted.

Besides all this, another aspect of these Whig histories is the incapacity of the historian to separate the then present facts from theories resting on the new ideas of liberty, and of right and wrong. They assume that the ministers, or, as they call it, King George, were doing a wrongful and immoral act in collecting taxes from the colonies, who, they assume, had a right to avoid taxation unless their delegates to some assembly consent. Whatever may be the rights of man in

a state of nature apart from the dominance of physical force, it is certain that as soon as he enters a society his rights are limited by his social duties, one of which is that he shall contribute to the support of the society. Until the American colonies had separated from the mother country they were subject to this elementary duty. How far any change of assessment could be agreed upon or submitted to delegates it is impossible to estimate. But such necessities must be dealt with by those in authority with moderation and tact, strict honesty in application of payments, and such knowledge of existing conditions as will enable them to judge how far the undoubted right can be exercised with advantage, or how far it was wise to enforce it.

The ministers from 1763 to 1770 appear to have had neither the knowledge nor the tact nor the honesty required. They failed to see the change which, under the shadow of the word liberty, was coming over the commercial system until it was too late. They harked back to 1688, trying to connect their theories of freedom woven on the outworn political catchwords of that day with the new spirit of revolt of all humanity against privilege and monopoly. The stream had flowed by them. The present did not rest on any fine-woven political arguments about rights, least of all on oratory about liberty, The Stamp Act was an incident. The reality was a contest between a system of trade monopoly, then generally accepted throughout the European world, and the new spirit of revolt against it which infected all who had suffered from the monopoly, legitimate traders and smugglers alike. It had nothing per se to do with the virtue or vice of British ministers or American mobs. It was simply a revolution in methods of trade which came quickly because it was in accordance with theories which (like the phrase "socialism" to-day) were sweeping an almost unresisting world. That is how it should be treated, not as an excuse for depraving personal character.

vii. Smuggling and Monopoly of Trade.-Leaving to one side the Stamp Act and the beastly outrages of the Boston mob, praised as patriotic courage, we pass to the prime cause of the quarrel, the principle of monopoly of trade, common to all European commerce.