ings with the
outside world, but it was a Government with no effective powers except
such as each separate State might independently choose to lend it. It
might wage war with England, but it could not effectually control or
regularly pay the military service of its own citizens; it might make a
treaty of peace with England, but it could not enforce on its citizens
distasteful obligations of that treaty. Such an ill-devised machine
would have worked well enough for a time, if the Union Government could
have attached to itself popular sentiments of honour and loyalty. But
the sentiments were not there; and it worked badly.

When once we were reconciled to a defeat which proved good for us, it
became a tradition among English writers to venerate the American
Revolution. Later English historians have revolted from this
indiscriminate veneration. They insist on another side of the facts: on
the hopelessness of the American cause but for the commanding genius of
Washington and his moral authority, and for the command which France and
Spain obtained of the seas; on the petty quarrelsomeness with which the
rights of the Colonists were urged, and the meanly skilful agitation
which forced on the final rupture; on the lack of sustained patriotic
effort during the war; on the base cruelty and dishonesty with which the
loyal minority were persecuted and the private rights guaranteed by the
peace ignored. It does not concern us to ascertain the precise justice
in this displeasing picture; no man now regrets the main result of the
Revolution, and we know that a new country is a new country, and that
there was much in the circumstances of the war to encourage indiscipline
and ferocity. But the fact that there is cause for such an indictment
bears in two ways upon our present subject.

In the first place, there has been a tendency both in England and in
America to look at this history upside down. The epoch of the Revolution
and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age--wherein lived the
elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest--to be followed by
almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more
pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The
faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is
largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many
influences that favoured decay. The nobility of the Revolution in the
eighteenth