Southern States, where a strong Royalist party still existed. The
capture of Charlestown and the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were
rendered fruitless by the obstinate resistance of General Greene; but
the United States remained weakened by bankruptcy and unnerved by hopes
of aid from France.

[Sidenote: America and Ireland.]

Hardly a year however had passed when the face of the war in America was
changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled in an attempt on North Carolina
by the refusal of his fellow-general, Sir Henry Clinton, to assist him,
Cornwallis fell back in 1781 on Virginia, and entrenched himself in the
lines of York Town. A sudden march of Washington brought him to the
front of the English troops at a moment when the French fleet held the
sea, and the British army was driven by famine in October to a surrender
as humiliating as that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunderbolt on
the wretched Minister, who had till now suppressed at his master's order
his own conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed. Opening his
arms and pacing wildly about the room, Lord North exclaimed, "It is all
over," and resigned. At this moment indeed the country seemed on the
brink of ruin. Humiliating as it was, England could have borne fifty
such calamities as the surrender at York Town. But in the very crisis of
the struggle with America she found herself confronted with a danger
nearer home. The revolt of one great dependency brought with it a
threatened revolt from another. In Ireland, as in the Colonies, England
had shrunk from carrying out either a national or an imperial policy.
She might have recognised Ireland as a free nationality, and bound it to
herself by federal bonds; or she might have absorbed it, as she had
absorbed Scotland, into the general mass of her own national life. With
a perverse ingenuity she had not only refrained from taking either of
these courses, but she had deliberately adopted the worst features of
both. Ireland was absolutely subject to Britain, but she formed no part
of it, she shared neither in its liberty nor its wealth. But on the
other hand she was allowed no national existence of her own. While all
the outer seeming of national life was left, while Ireland possessed in
name an army, a Parliament, a magistracy, the mass of the Irish people
was as strange to all this life as the savages of Polynesia. Every
Catholic Irishman, and there were five Irish Catholics to every Irish
Prote