the evidence now before us, we may fairly doubt whether any concessions would have satisfied the party, numerically small but large in energy and audacity, which was determined on independence. But when the case is so considered, the only policy with which Lord North's administration can be exclusively blamed is the refusal to admit the independence at once, instead of vainly endeavouring to prevent it by force. We are all apt to say this now, without reflecting that we might probably have thought very differently in 1776; and that, in fact, as the position of the English Government then was not altogether different from that of the Northerners of the United States in 1861, the same arguments which condemn the English for using force must also condemn the Northerners. The essential difference in their application is that the Northerners had no foreign complications, and were able to worry through the difficulties among which the want of an efficient army and navy had planted them; the English had similar difficulties to contend with, intensified by the distance; and when the French joined the enemy their cause was hopeless.

That they had not an efficient navy and army-that indeed was largely the fault of the Ministry which entrusted these departments to Sandwich and Germain. And yet there was nothing in Sandwich's previous career to show him unfit to control the Admiralty; rather the contrary; for in a previous administration, with Anson as a dry nurse, the Admiralty, under his nominal leadership, had done very well. His colleagues in the Cabinet knew nothing about the navy, and accepted his word for it that all was right; and even his subordinates at the Admiralty, who ought to have understood the state of things, were ready to speak well of him. Germain, too, had wealthy and influential relations and friends, who had virtually saved his life justly forfeited for his astounding misconduct at Minden, and had forced Rockingham to remit the logical effect of the sentence pronounced by the court-martial. As Secretary for War he displayed the same insolence as when in command of a division of the army. It is quite certain that a large proportion of our military failure in America was due to the presumption and incompetence of Germain. But not all: and for the greater part of the remainder the blame must rest, not on the King, not on the Ministers, but on the nation, which then, as always, had refused to keep on foot an army equal to the possible requirements. When an army was wanted had always been considered the proper time to raise one. But on this, as on other occasions, an army could not be raised; and thus, as had happened before and has happened since, the nation was reduced

to depend on irregular levies and a force unworthy of its reputation.

"If you want a thing done, do it yourself," is a trite maxim, which in civil life and, indeed, in naval, the English have very generally accepted and acted on; but in military life, for the last two centuries at any rate, they have preferred the conclusion" pay somebody else to do it." Sometimes, as in the Seven Years War, or in the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, this has taken the form of heavy subsidies to foreign sovereigns; at others, that of raising foreign regiments, as was attempted-probably for the last time-in the Russian war of fifty years ago. The improved tone of public feeling through Europe rendered this a more dismal failure than ever before, and will prevent its ever being tried again in exactly that manner; but in 1776 it seemed the most natural device in the world to supply the national want by foreign refuse.

Sir George Trevelyan rightly condemns the practice as disgraceful in its foreign aspects, costly in its economic, ineffective in its military and ruinous in its political results; but he is most unjust in assigning the blame of it to George III. and his Ministers. It was, in fact, the way of raising an army which the constitution, as interpreted by the voice of the nation, rendered necessary; and one, too, which had been common with other nations, though they had, by this time, learned that it was both costly and ineffective. Sir George Trevelyan seems to ignore this, and speaks of the enlisting of foreign soldiers as an enormity peculiar to George III.'s Ministers and the American War. Of course it was nothing of the sort. Throughout the whole range of modern history, Germany had been the recruiting-ground for Europe; and not to speak further of the continental wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is sufficient here to remind Sir George that the Highland rising of 1745 was largely crushed-a measure of whose righteousness we must suppose him, as a Whig, firmly convinced-by means of Hessian troops imported for the purpose. If it was so terribly heinous an offence for George III. to send Hessian troops to put down a rebellion against English authority, what was it for George II. to call in Hessians to settle what many would consider a purely personal quarrel ?

As to the practical disadvantage of the measure, we are entirely at one with Sir George. In the circumstances then existing, the enrolling of German regiments for service in America was more than disadvantageous, it was ruinous. They were bad as soldiers, they were bad as men. On more than two or three occasions they fled from the enemy whom it was their

duty to fight, and plundered or cruelly maltreated the peaceful and loyal inhabitants whom it was their duty to defend. Naturally, the Landgrave of Hesse did not pick out his best men for us, or carefully avoid sending us his worst. Lecky, commenting on the injury done to our cause in America, quotes from a contemporary Prussian writer-"Les recrues hessoises sont en grande partie des malfaiteurs détachés de la chaine"; but he adds-"There is reason to believe that large numbers of criminals of all but the worst category passed at this time into the English army and navy." In this there was nothing Writers studying for the first time any particular period in detail are apt to be horrified at the revelation; but in fact, army and navy had always been subject to this taint and continued to be so. It is only of recent years that the authorities of our War Office have given up the idea of the army being a dumping-ground for the sweepings of the jails and the gutters.

new.

Sentimental writers are fond of dilating on the brutality of the discipline both ashore and afloat. Says Sir George: "It was almost universally believed, in military circles, that flogging was a valuable preservative of discipline at home, and quite indispensable on active service"; and goes on to speak of our recent experience in South Africa as having proved the contrary. It would be contrary to my present purpose to question this in its entirety; but it seems not to have occurred to him, as an important feature of the problem, that the army of 1776 and afterwards contained an enormous proportion of jail-birds and blackguards, of criminals and hooligans, while of the army in South Africa the greater part were decent, well-behaved men. Considered as a sink, a social cesspool, the navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was nearly as badly used as the army; but the discipline was more strict without being so severe; and with the improved methods of entering men, the whole system has been altered. At the present time there is probably no class of working men so entirely respectable as the bluejackets of our navy.

Such as they were, however, and subject to a method of enforcing discipline which they could understand and appreciate, the English soldiers in America behaved on the whole fairly well; they fought well, and, in general, treated the inhabitants among whom they were quartered with kindness and consideration, though they were far from being as immaculate as Sir George Trevelyan represents them. It is his cue to throw the whole blame of the outrages incidental to a military occupation on the Hessians, and thus to emphasise the blame which he attributes to the most wicked Ministry for sending such men

to America. We can see now that it would have been very much better to have sent none but Englishmen ; but there was no army of Englishmen ready to hand, and it was as difficult then as now to force the recruiting. Sir George Trevelyan does not recognise this, and thinks that the difficulty then was entirely owing to the English people's disapproval of the English policy and of the war.

He has elaborated this view with extreme care and at unmeasured length, so that it appears necessary to point out that the slackness in raising recruits for the army, the objection of seamen to enter for the navy was not peculiar to this war, and was not a bit more marked than it was in the Seven Years War, to which Sir George refers as illustrating the contrary; nor even than in the war against France in the end of the century. The difficulty has always been felt when war, finding the country totally unprepared, has called for a sudden and immediate addition to the forces kept together on the peace establishment. Such difficulty, still more acute, had been felt when, after Walpole's long peace, war with Spain broke out in 1739. Every reader of Anson's Voyage will remember how the projected expedition to the Philippines had to be dropped on account of the want of men and the impossibility of raising them; will remember also the shifts that Anson was put to to get his little expedition manned at all, and how wretchedly manned it was when it eventually left England. And this was the rule; a standing navy, and, still more, a standing army were held to be unconstitutional-a danger to the liberty of the people; but the want of them at this particular crisis is held by Sir George to be due to the crass neglect of the Ministry. He says:

A civil war had already broken out; foreign wars were only too sure to supervene; and our armaments had been allowed to dwindle until the means of offence and defence were almost entirely wanting. The bare facts and dates, without epithet or comment, sufficiently characterise the improvidence of the Ministry. When the Army and Navy Estimates were moved in December 1774 the seamen were reduced by 4000, and the land forces were fixed at a number below 18,000 effective men. So it came to pass that, in August 1775, before active operations had continued for a quarter of a year, the kingdom at home had been denuded of all but a few weak and scattered regiments, and our only organised body of troops was shut u in Boston.

The first necessity, then, was to increase the army. In the Highlands recruiting was easy, for the Highland chiefs, now that their military power had been broken, were converting themselves from feudal superiors into rack-renting landlords, and the clansmen were learning the hard necessity of seeking a career beyond the seas. In Ireland, on the other hand, the

recruiting was slow, for the harvests had been exceptionally good; "the farmers' cabins were overflowing with unwonted plenty"; "corn of all kinds and potatoes were a drug . . . they were never known at so cheap a rate before." Here we have a clear statement of the economic reasons which, in Scotland and Ireland, accelerated or impeded recruiting; and in England, in a season at least as prosperous as in Ireland, it is certainly needless to seek for an explanation of the slackness in a want of "enthusiasm for the war among the classes from which soldiers were drawn." It calls for an exaggerated stretch of imagination to conceive those classes-five quarters of a century ago-knowing or caring much about the course of the war, the grievances of the colonists, or the wicked policy of the King's Ministers.

As to the sea service of the Crown, it was distinctly unpopular among seamen; it always had been so, and it continued to be so till within living memory, when the conditions of it were so far altered that it has become a prize to be sought rather than a penalty to be shunned. But this distaste had nothing whatever to do with the cause or objects of the war; it was the result of unfavourable regulations as to pay and prize-money, of the frequent turning over the men from ship to ship without their having a chance of setting foot on dry land, and still more, of the very superior attractions of the merchants' service, especially privateers. "Sweet," wrote Byron, "is pillage to soldiers, prize-money to seamen." In reality prize-money in the navy was so distributed as to give an unduly large share to the superior officers, an unduly small share to the seamen. For the capture of Havana, for instance, the money paid to the navy was £368,092, of which the admiral's share was £122,697; a seaman's, £3 14s. 9åd. On board privateers the distribution of prize-money was more equitable, the pay was better and more regularly paid, the food was better, the discipline less severe, and the cruises short. As the immediate consequence of this, the privateers had the pick of as many seamen as they wanted, while the ships of war were compelled to resort to the press-gang and the crimp for the privateer's leavings.

Sir George Trevelyan is at pains to cite instances of the roughness of the press-gangs and the hostility of city corporations to them, as if such things were peculiar to the time of which he is speaking. If that is not the inference which he wishes to convey, his anecdotes have no meaning; and yet, as he refers to Smollett and Marryat, he must know that, in earlier as well as in later wars, press-gangs had an evil reputation; and a small part of the trouble he has been at in hunting