University of Virginia Library

When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened after 1765, Washington ‘was less eager than some others in declaring or declaiming against the mother country;’ (Mahon: Hist. ch. lii).

Looking at the American War of Independence without party-passion and distortion, as should now at least be possible to Englishmen, the main cause must be acknowledged to lie simply in the growth and geographical position of the Colonies, which had brought them to the age of natural liberty, and had begun to fit them for its exercise:—facts which it was equally in accordance with nature that the Fatherland should fail to perceive. For the causes which gradually determined American resistance we must look, (as regards us), not to the blundering English legislation after 1760,—to the formalism of Grenville, the subterfuges of Franklin,—but to the whole course of our commercial policy since the Revolution: As regards the Colonies, to the extinction of the power of France in America by the Treaty of Paris in 1763: (Lecky: ch. v; Mahon: ch. xliii).

The Stamp Act of 1765 brought home, indeed, to a rapidly-developing people the supremacy claimed across the Atlantic; but the obnoxious taxation which it imposed, (despite the splendid sophistry of Chatham), cannot be shown to differ essentially from the trade restrictions and monopolies enacted in long series after 1688, as the result of the predominance obtained at the Revolution by the commercial classes in this country, and which so far as 1765 the colonies openly recognized as legal.

Going, however, beyond these minor motives, the true cause was unquestionably that the time for separate life, for America to be herself, had come. This was a crisis which home-legislation could do little to create or to avert: a natural law, which only worked itself out ostensibly by political manœuvres and military operations, so ill-managed as to be rarely creditable to either side;—and, regarded simply as a ‘struggle for existence,’ is, in the eye of impartial history, hardly within the scope of praise or censure.

But it was a neutrally tinted background like this, which could most effectually bring into full relief the great qualities of the one great man who was prominent in the conflict.

See Petrarch's beautiful lines: Trionfo della Morte, cap. I.

Compare the epitaph by Ennius on Scipio:

History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George Washington.

It is to Odin, whatever date be thereby signified, that our royal genealogy runs back.