cratic government of the
time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference,
especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour about
the English which appears especially in this, that while they often (as
in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they were
entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) to
make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case for
their having been more or less right. George III.'s Government laid
certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of
America. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and
precedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such
colonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive
sort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution.
The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with
liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred
beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great
chief of the new and very national _noblesse_, was typical of them in
being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the
colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favoured
colonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was
then the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how
wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even
North compromised; and though George III., being a fool, might himself
have refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect the
Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case for
the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel,
was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not with
a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war on
something much finer and more formidable than poor old George.
Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured
it primarily as a duel of George III. and George Washington; and, as we
have noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldom
false. King George's head was not much more useful on the throne than it
was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board was
really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold
not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig poli