be
compelled to pay. Was it not to impose tyranny and slavery to tell
a people that their property would be taken by force if they did not
choose to give it? What free man would not rather die than yield on such
a point?

The familiar workings of modern democracy have taught us that a great
political issue must be discussed in broad terms of high praise or
severe blame. The contestants will exaggerate both the virtue of
the side they espouse and the malignity of the opposing side; nice
discrimination is not possible. It was inevitable that the dispute with
the colonies should arouse angry vehemence on both sides. The passionate
speech of Patrick Henry in Virginia, in 1763, which made him famous,
and was the forerunner of his later appeal, "Give me Liberty or give me
Death," related to so prosaic a question as the right of disallowance
by England of an act passed by a colonial legislature, a right
exercised long and often before that time and to this day a part of the
constitutional machinery of the British Empire. Few men have lived more
serenely poised than Washington, yet, as we have seen, he hated the
British with an implacable hatred. He was a humane man. In earlier
years, Indian raids on the farmers of Virginia had stirred him to
"deadly sorrow," and later, during his retreat from New York, he was
moved by the cries of the weak and infirm. Yet the same man felt no
touch of pity for the Loyalists of the Revolution. To him they were
detestable parricides, vile traitors, with no right to live. When we
find this note in Washington, in America, we hardly wonder that the
high Tory, Samuel Johnson, in England, should write that the proposed
taxation was no tyranny, that it had not been imposed earlier because
"we do not put a calf into the plough; we wait till he is an ox," and
that the Americans were "a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful
for anything which we allow them short of hanging." Tyranny and treason
are both ugly things. Washington believed that he was fighting the one,
Johnson that he was fighting the other, and neither side would admit the
charge against itself.

Such are the passions aroused by civil strife. We need not now, when
they are, or ought to be, dead, spend any time in deploring them. It
suffices to explain them and the events to which they led. There was
one and really only one final issue. Were the American colonies free to
govern themselves as they liked or might their government in th