tions between crag and meadow and stream that make the life and
meaning of the whole. We learn the "lay of the land," and become, in a
humble way, geographers. So in the history of men and nations, while we
remain immersed in the study of personal incidents and details, as what
such a statesman said or how many men were killed in such a battle, we
may quite fail to understand what it was all about, and we shall be sure
often to misjudge men's characters and estimate wrongly the importance
of many events. For this reason we cannot clearly see the meaning of the
history of our own times. The facts are too near us; we are down among
them, like the man who could not see the forest because there were so
many trees. But when we look back over a long interval of years, we can
survey distant events and personages like points in a vast landscape and
begin to discern the meaning of it all. In this way we come to see that
history is full of lessons for us. Very few things have happened in past
ages with which our present welfare is not in one way or another
concerned. Few things have happened in any age more interesting or more
important than the American Revolution.

CHAPTER II.

THE COLONIES IN 1750.

It is always difficult in history to mark the beginning and end of a
period. Events keep rushing on and do not pause to be divided into
chapters; or, in other words, in the history which really takes place, a
new chapter is always beginning long before the old one is ended. The
divisions we make when we try to describe it are merely marks that we
make for our own convenience. In telling the story of the American
Revolution we must stop somewhere, and the inauguration of President
Washington is a very proper place. We must also begin somewhere, but it
is quite clear that it will not do to begin with the Declaration of
Independence in July, 1776, or even with the midnight ride of Paul
Revere in April, 1775. For if we ask what caused that "hurry of hoofs in
a village street," and what brought together those five-and-fifty
statesmen at Philadelphia, we are not simply led back to the Boston
Tea-Party, and still further to the Stamp Act, but we find it necessary
to refer to events that happened more than a century before the
Revolution can properly be said to have begun. Indeed, if we were going
to take a very wide view of the situation, and try to point out its
relations to the general history of mankind, we should have to go