the least educated of the common people. If the severe pressure of the mercantile policy, unflinchingly. carried out, had not first filled the colonists with resentment and robbed them of their prosperity, the imperial claim to impose taxes would probably have been submitted to without much ado. And if the suppression of their trade in 1764 had not been instantly followed by Grenville's plan for extorting revenue from them, they would probably in time have been reconciled to the blow which had been dealt to their commerce. It was the conjunction of two highly oppressive pieces of policy which taught them that they would certainly lose more by tame compliance than they could possibly lose by an active resistance.

The conflict was thus a shock in which substantial circumstance encountered a pair of phantoms, the Mercantile Policy and the devotion to barren Rights. False ideas often gain temporary victories over the facts which they no longer cover. In this instance the superior material force and energy happened to be on the side of the facts from the first. The intellectual error of the mercantile system, and the moral error of regarding every fancied or real right as a possession to be vindicated at all hazard and all cost, were thrust into the lower place proper to them. The

claim of actual circumstance to have ideas adjusted to its visible requirements, was triumphantly made good, with a rapidity and completeness of which, alas! history furnishes too few examples.

Much ridicule, a little of it not altogether undeserved, has been thrown upon the opening clause of the Declaration of Independence, which asserts the inherent natural right of man to enjoy life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Yet there is an implied corollary in this which enjoins the highest morality that in our present state we are able to think of as possible. If happiness is the right of our neighbour, then not to hinder him, but to help him in its pursuit, must plainly be our duty. If all men have a claim, then each man is under an obligation. The corollary thus involved is the corner-stone of morality. It was an act of good augury thus to inscribe happiness as entering at once into the right of all, and into the duty of all, in the very head and front of the new charter, as the base of a national existence, and the first principle of a national government. The omen has not been falsified. The Americans have been true to their first doctrine. They have never swerved aside to set up caste and privilege, to lay down

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the doctrine that one man's happiness ought to be an object of greater solicitude to society than any other man's, or that one order should be encouraged to seek its prosperity through the depression of any other order. Their example proved infectious. The assertion in the New World, that men have a right to happiness and an obligation to promote the happiness of one another, struck a spark in the Old World. Political construction in America immediately preceded the last violent stage of demolition in Europe.

Burke must often have thought deeply of the destinies of the kindred nation with whose independence his own efforts will ever be so indissolubly associated. But all his reflections upon the future of America, notwithstanding his conviction that her independence was the necessary price of the maintenance of free. government in England, must have been tinged with bitterness. Great as America might become, and as he honestly wished her to become, her greatness would bring no renown or laud to the mother-country, or its incomparable Constitution. Though above the narrow vices incident to patriotism in weaker and less loftily moral souls, it could not have been more grievous to him to look back upon the circumstances under which England and her sons parted company, than it was

mortifying to look forward to a glory for America which, if statesmen had been prescient and nations just, might have been added to the abundant glories of England. Burke, we may be sure, had none of that speculative fortitude which enabled Adam Smith to anticipate with composure the possible removal of the seat of empire to that part of the empire which in a century (from 1776) would probably contribute most to the general defence. He was intellectually capable of foreseeing much which he was not morally capable of allowing himself fully to realise, and certainly not of constraining himself to dwell upon.

To the student of human history who lives in later times, there are few objects of meditation so interesting as the probable course of evolution in the great empire whose origin we have been considering. The conditions are in some respects so profoundly different from those which have to be taken into account in observing the development of European civilization, while at the same time there has been such a constant and reciprocal action at work between America and Europe, that our usual historic apparatus misses its hold and application. It is comparatively simple to trace the elements which America contributes to the decomposition of the old,

1 Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. c. vii. pt. 3, p. 282 (ed. of 1855).

and the construction of the new state in Europe. But how, with our ordinary methods, can we discern the main currents of the history of a country, first incongruously colonized by Swedes, Dutch, French, Spanish, and English; which has never undergone the harmonizing and binding influence of an uniform spiritual belief; which daily receives enormous bodies of immigrants with as many ways of thinking as there are bodies, about religion and government, about the past and the future; whose territorial consolidation is not yet accomplished,-how can we analyse, or understand, or characterise, a national organization that exists under such conditions as these? how attempt as yet to assign a place in the history of mankind to the event which propelled America far out of the grooves along which we continue our course, into new and unfamiliar channels of its own? For the philosophy of American history, the exposition of its moral forces, its rootideas, its expanding elements,-for this we shall have long to wait.