not exist.

Now that we have settled down and become a great nation all this seems
like very foolish business to some of us who cut off coupons or sit at
roll top desks endorsing the backs of documents until we have lost the
natural feeling of vigorous manhood so characteristic of the Boers and
the followers of Washington. We have forgotten our revolution. Our own
acts in it now seem too heroic for our stomachs when we see others
practicing them. Ireland has been practicing similar methods against
England for hundreds of years. It may be a foolish game, but it can be
made a very long one. It has lasted some seven hundred years in Ireland
without success on either side. It lasted some thirty years in Cuba and
was successful and we have set the seal of our approval on that success.

I shall now restore to your recollection the famous Duche letter which
was written in the autumn of 1777. Duche was a brilliant young clergyman
of the Church of England and was settled in Philadelphia. He was
inclined to take sides with the rebel colonists, and would have been
very glad to see them attain what they wished if it could have been done
peaceably and in the manner of ordinary business negotiations; and he
was even willing to go a little farther than this and have the rebel
colonists make a certain amount of armed resistance up to a certain
point, not beyond the bounds of good taste. In short he was very much of
your professed way of thinking, and he represented a large class of
people who were of that way of thinking. At the meeting of the first
Continental Congress he opened the session with a prayer so eloquent and
suitable that it attracted universal attention, and gave him at once a
political standing of some little importance.

But after three years of Boer tactics, irregular methods, hopelessness,
evident failure, the rise into power of men who were not gentlemen,
petty peculation and fraud in the rebel army, apparent deterioration in
character of the men in the rebel congress, the undignified runaway,
wandering habit of that congress with its papers hauled from one refuge
to another in a wagon, and similar things which make a deep impression
on men of a certain kind of education and refinement, he saw so clearly
the unutterable folly and wickedness of the attempt at independence that
he could stand it no longer.

There were many others who thought just as he did; but they usually
either went to live in England or Canada