e advantage she
should be reaped from those contests, didn't follow them, let us get
away, didn't in short make any progress to speak of in really conquering
us? Perhaps you attributed this to our brave troops and our great
Washington. Well, our troops were brave and Washington was great; but
there was more behind--more than your school teaching ever led you to
suspect, if your schooling was like mine. I imagined England as
being just one whole unit of fury and tyranny directed against us and
determined to stamp out the spark of liberty we had kindled. No such
thing! England was violently divided in sentiment about us. Two parties,
almost as opposed as our North and South have been--only it was not
sectional in England--held very different views about liberty and
the rights of Englishmen. The King's party, George the Third and his
upholders, were fighting to saddle autocracy upon England; the other
party, that of Pitt and Burke, were resisting this, and their sentiments
and political beliefs led them to sympathize with our revolt against
George III. "I rejoice," writes Horace Walpole, Dec. 5, 1777, to the
Countess of Upper Ossory, "that the Americans are to be free, as they
had a right to be, and as I am sure they have shown they deserve to
be.... I own there are very able Englishmen left, but they happen to
be on t'other side of the Atlantic." It was through Whig influence
that General Howe did not follow up his victories over us, because they
didn't wish us to be conquered, they wished us to be able to vindicate
the rights to which they held all Englishmen were entitled. These men
considered us the champions of that British liberty which George III was
attempting to crush. They disputed the rightfulness of the Stamp Act.
When we refused to submit to the Stamp Tax in 1766, it was then that
Pitt exclaimed in Parliament: "I rejoice that America has resisted....
If ever this nation should have a tyrant for a King, six millions of
freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit
to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." But
they were not willing. When the hour struck and the war came, so many
Englishmen were on our side that they would not enlist against us,
refused to fight us, and George III had to go to Germany and obtain
Hessians to help him out. His war against us was lost at home, on
English soil, through English disapproval of his course, almost as much
as it was lost