become possible for the feeling that led Burgoyne, a professed enemy of
oppression in India and elsewhere, to accept his American command when
so many other officers threw up their commissions rather than serve in
a civil war against the Colonies. His biographer De Fonblanque, writing
in 1876, evidently regarded his position as indefensible. Nowadays, it
is sufficient to say that Burgoyne was an Imperialist. He sympathized
with the colonists; but when they proposed as a remedy the disruption
of the Empire, he regarded that as a step backward in civilization. As
he put it to the House of Commons, "while we remember that we are
contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember
that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British
Empire." Eighty-four years after his defeat, his republican conquerors
themselves engaged in a civil war for the integrity of their Union. In
1886 the Whigs who represented the anti-Burgoyne tradition of American
Independence in English politics, abandoned Gladstone and made common
cause with their political opponents in defence of the Union between
England and Ireland. Only the other day England sent 200,000 men into
the field south of the equator to fight out the question whether South
Africa should develop as a Federation of British Colonies or as an
independent Afrikander United States. In all these cases the Unionists
who were detached from their parties were called renegades, as Burgoyne
was. That, of course, is only one of the unfortunate consequences of
the fact that mankind, being for the most part incapable of politics,
accepts vituperation as an easy and congenial substitute. Whether
Burgoyne or Washington, Lincoln or Davis, Gladstone or Bright, Mr.
Chamberlain or Mr. Leonard Courtney was in the right will never be
settled, because it will never be possible to prove that the government
of the victor has been better for mankind than the government of the
vanquished would have been. It is true that the victors have no doubt
on the point; but to the dramatist, that certainty of theirs is only
part of the human comedy. The American Unionist is often a Separatist
as to Ireland; the English Unionist often sympathizes with the Polish
Home Ruler; and both English and American Unionists are apt to be
Disruptionists as regards that Imperial Ancient of Days, the Empire of
China. Both are Unionists concerning Canada, but with a difference as
to the precise applicati