the nations of the
earth. It was for these negotiations that Franklin, as we have said,
brought out from its obscurity that gala suit which he had worn for the
last time when he stood at the bar of the House of Commons and listened
to the brutal and foolish assaults of Wedderburn. Many days had passed
since that day.

So ended one of the most unjust and one of the most foolish wars ever
waged by England. It must never be forgotten that the war was in no
sense an English war. The English people as a whole had then no voice
to express itself one way or the other. Of those Englishmen whose
voices had to be heard, the best and the wisest were as angry in their
denunciations of the crime of the King and the King's ministers, and as
cordial in their {185} admiration of Washington and his companions, as
if they had been members of that Continental Congress which first in
Philadelphia proclaimed the existence of a new nation.

[Sidenote: 1778--Death of the Earl of Chatham]

The fatal war which had cost the English King the loss of his greatest
colonies, which had spilt a vast amount of blood and wasted a vast
amount of treasure in order to call into being a strong and naturally
resentful rival to the power of England, must be said also to have cost
the life of the greatest English statesman of the century. The genius
of Chatham had never been more nobly employed than in protesting with
all the splendor of its eloquence against the unjust war upon the
Americans and the unjust deeds which had heralded the war. But time,
that had only swelled the ranks of the wise and sane who thought as
Chatham had thought and found their own utterance from the fire of his
words, had wrought a change in the attitude of a great statesman.
Harassed by the disease that racked his body, the mind of Chatham had
altered. The noble views that he had maintained in defiance of a
headstrong king and a corrupt ministry had changed in the face of the
succession of calamities that had fallen upon his country. The success
that he had desired for the insurgent arms had been accorded, and he
came to despair at the consequence of that success. He had been
granted his heart's desire in full measure, and the gratification
choked him. When it came to be a question of conceding to the
colonists that formal recognition of an independence which they had
already won, the intellect of Chatham revolted against the policy
himself had fostered. He forgot or