general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fitted for them.”1

The defenders of expediency as the criterion of morals are commonly charged by their opponents with holding a doctrine that lowers the moral capabilities, and that would ruin society if it were unfortunately to gain general acceptance. The king and the minister in 1774 entertained this view, and scorned to submit their policy to so mean a test as that prescribed by the creed of utility. If they had listened to the voice of the most eloquent and sagacious of the upholders of this test, they would have saved the empire. If they had for a moment awakened to the utilitarian truth, that the statesman is concerned, not at all with the rights of the government, but altogether with the interests and happiness of the governed; if they had weighed their policy in the capacious balance of expediency, rather than with the airy, unreal, deceptive apparatus of the abstract principles of sovereignty, at least the separation of the mother country from her too powerful sons might have been effected as such a change ought to have been effected. As it was,

the disaster in which they were finally overwhelmed formed an expressive comment upon the supremacy of

1 Speech on Conciliation with America, Works, i. 192, a.

the metaphysical notion of absolute right in practical politics. The actual bearings of circumstances, so visible to anybody who, like Burke, looked upon them from the point of high practical sense, were hidden from the sight of men who surrounded themselves with a hazy medium of abstract and universally applicable ideas. The conception of an indefeasible right of sovereignty blinded them. It was they who were thus kept grovelling along the lowest ground, while their opponents, who chose to measure their policy by the standard of convenience, of the interest of the greatest number, of utility and expediency, were guided by it to the loftiest heights of political wisdom and beneficence.

The baneful superstition that there is in morals, and in the art of politics, therefore, which is a province of morals, some supernaturally illumined lamp, still survives to make men neglect the intelligible and available tests of public convenience and practical justice, which is no more than expediency in its widest shape. If Burke were among us at this day, enjoining habitual recourse in every political measure to this standard, he would find that men are nearly as disposed as ever to reason downwards from high-sounding ideas of Right, Sovereignty, Property, and so forth; which have in

truth no invariable conformity to facts, and which are only treated with reverence because they are absurdly supposed to be ultimate, eternal entities, incapable of further resolution. Are we sure that if a set of conditions similar to those of 1776 were to recur in our own time, we should be wise enough to toss aside lawyers' questions as to the exact measure and boundaries of our rights, and examine positively and simply what would be the course most likely to reconcile the best interests of all the people concerned? If anybody is sure of this, let him look at Ireland and the policy of the landowners' party in that country.

The same vicious spirit of adherence to the very letter of legal or quasi-constitutional rights had ever marked the whole policy of England towards her American dependencies. It was the same spirit which, long before Grenville's scheme of taxation, had planted and nourished the germs of discord between the mother country and the colonies. The Stamp Act and the Tea Duty were no more than the last drops in a full cup. They were the assertion of a right of one kind, made without any thought as to the profit to be drawn from it. The laws regulating the commerce of the colonies were the assertion of a right of another

kind, left equally unexamined by the only test proper to it. The policy pursued in the former instance by the Ministry and the landowning aristocracy and the people over whom these had influence, and in the latter instance by the merchants, was in either case the creature of an arbitrary persuasion of a right in the mother country to do whatever she might deem convenient to her own interests with her colonies, without thought or heed for their welfare. The merchants detested and opposed the war with all their might. But it was they who had sown the seed. Their folly was eclipsed by the infatuation of the Government, but if the landowners fancied that the colonists existed for the purpose of saving them the land-tax, at least they could allege in their excuse the creed of the merchants, that colonies existed for the purpose of enlarging the profits of the home traders.

Historians, in treating of the American rebellion, have confined their arguments too exclusively to the question of internal taxation, and the right or policy of exercising this prerogative. The true source of the rebellion lay deeper, in our traditional colonial policy. Just as the Spaniards had been excited to the discovery of America by the hope of obtaining gold and silver, the

English merchants utilized the discovery by the same fallacious method, and with the same fallacious aspirations. Each wished to bring as much as they could of the precious metals to Europe, and each, with true commercial selfishness, disregarded the interests of the inhabitants whom they found there. Each brought down retribution upon their country, though in unequal measure. Spain was undone by the influx of gold, and by the diversion of her industry from manufactures to the gold mines. England had to endure first the material loss produced by the short-sighted rapacity of her traders, and then both the ignominy and the material loss combined, which flowed from the rapacity of her aristocracy and the incompetency of her patrician administrators. The Mercantile System is now so stone-dead, that we forget that only a hundred years ago it was full of animation, the key to our whole commercial policy, the great check to industrial growth, the pertinacious and obstructive relic of mediæval superstitions about the mysterious virtues of gold. A hundred years ago the commercial classes believed that the prime object of their pursuits was to get as much gold and silver into England as they could. They sought, therefore, to make their country, as nearly as they might, a solitary centre of the expor