for the paradoxical offense of "sound casuistry." The real Junius was present, and Pownall was there also, in the train of the Duke of Bedford, looking after the preliminaries of the Peace of Paris. This is very negative evidence, as it seems, by which to associate Pownall with so brilliant an atrocity.

In 1767 Pownall was again returned to Parliament. The ministry was Tory and he a Whig in opposition. Throughout the long Parliament, which began in 1768, Pownall was uniformly on the side of America. In his speech against the "Bill for suspending the power of the New York legislature," the first he delivered, he announced that the people of America were resolved never to submit to any internal tax imposed by a legislature in which they had no share. For seven years anterior to our Revolution he alone continued to warn Parliament of the dangers attending their American measures. He worked persistently in the interest of the colonies; he sought to extend the Nullum Tempus Bill here, and opposed the extension of the Bill for Quartering Troops. He added beneficent clauses to the Mutiny Bill, requiring the civil magistrates, who invoked the aid of the soldiery, to explain their reasons in writing. When called upon to defend his amendments, he delivered a luminous speech on the character of civil governments, declaring that the authority of government, like that of a school-master, ended when force began.

An account of his parliamentary labors would alone require a volume. His courageous and humane attitude on American questions lessened his influence in Parliament. On all other questions he continued the highest authority. In all Spanish-American problems no one equaled him. Because of his economic and statistical knowledge the Irish Parliament employed him to defend the linen interests of Ireland, and the English Parliament intrusted him with difficult investigations relative to the assize and the mode of lessening the cost of bread. But his main interests, while in Parliament, were with the British North-American Colonies, and he always found time to write on them. He was a man of intense intellectual activity; even in his hours of leisure and when he traveled, he went to the seats of the more interesting antiquities. From these spots he wrote profound papers on archæology, on a Roman vase or a Greek coin, on the Druidical remains, or on the aboriginal vestiges in Wales and Ireland. He wrote on early architecture, on ancient painting. He published theory of ocean currents, and treatises on subjects as diverse as political economy and navigation. He investigated the true principles of drainage and sewers, and these pursuits of his leisure made him a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries.

Pownall has been censured because on the outbreak of the American Revolution he allied himself with the Tory war party under Lord North. His successor, Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, says in his Diary, that "Pownall was frightened at having sown the wind which reaped such a whirlwind." I am convinced, whatever others may think, and despite the verdict of several professional historians of this country, that in changing his party name Pownall remained true to his principles. His critics overlook the fact that at the end of Pitt's splendid administration, the Whigs and Tories of England exchanged principles on internal matters of English politics. In regard to the principles of American liberty, Pownall when he became a Tory was the same Pownall when a Whig. He was, no doubt, greatly grieved at the armed resistance of the Americans; he had hoped for a peaceful revolution, and when war broke out he thought that he detected the intrigues of the house of Bourbon and the court of France. He recognized that it was the end of his colonial union, but he blamed the Americans far less than he blamed the Whigs, who had refused to hearken to him long years before. Like our War Democrats, he was now for the war and against most of its principles.

Early in the session of 1775 he took occasion to refute the charge of inconsistency and to speak for America. He supported the bill for restraining the trade of the American colonies until their revolt ceased, and he found, to the astonishment of the House, a precedent for it in a bill directed against Barbadoes, and Virginia, passed in 1650, more than a century before; but in the same speech he called upon his country to proclaim peace, and peace by acceding to terms. After the Battle of Lexington, from which we date our Revolution, he opposed compromise because he thought it useless, and he opposed Burke because he thought half measures were futile. In December, 1777, six years before the peace, he spoke against one of Mr. Fox's pacific measures to induce the colonies to return to their allegiance. He said "He knew that he should displease gentlemen on both sides of the House of Commons, but that England's sovereignty over America was abolished and gone forever," and he bade England make haste to a commercial treaty in order to frustrate French influence. Is there any wonder that it was said, "Such a Tory and such a friend to Franklin would ruin any party in England?" His speech was a great delight to this country, and the more effective because the speaker was a Tory and had no political interest to subserve. In the next year he spoke against Lord North's employment of the American Indians in warfare, and proposed a modus vivendi by which neither combatant should employ savages—a measure, he said, Congress would accede to. In 1778

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he laid before the ministry a plan for peace, but in his plan the independence of the colonies was a sine qua non. At that early stage of the conflict the ministers refused even to lay this plan before the irascible king. Pownall continued throughout the Revolution a thorn in the flesh of his party, but as he was a native-born Englishman, he was against the foes of his country. No doubt, what Franklin said of Pownall in the year 1777 continued true during this entire period of Pownall's career—“ He is very ill heard at present."

But in 1780 Pownall's patience was exhausted, and he gave notice that unless some one else brought in some explicit proposition for peace with America, he himself should do so, and having waited till the following year, 1781-still two years before the actual peace-he at last presented a bill "to empower his Majesty to make peace or truce with America." As this bill was opposed by Lord North and the Tories, and supported by the Whigs, he, at the close of the session, retired from Parliament.

There can be no doubt that he then regarded his long parliamentary career as a failure. A letter of subsequent date to his "dear old Friend," as he often called Franklin, demonstrates this. His conception-the great English-speaking empire-was vanishing in the disruption which he first prophesied, and he had staked all his usefulness and the labor of a life on a single idea which was proving a failure; his fabric, however, crumbled, leaving no particle of dishonor resting on him. During his colonial administration and his parliamentary life of twenty years, no latent or patent hostility to a single principle of what the world is beginning to recognize as American political philosophy can be detected.

The residue of his life was henceforth devoted to the ordinary pursuits of a private gentleman. He was far from idle, but the desultory nature of his occupation indicates that he recognized that he had played his part, and had not taken. Fortunately for him, some years after Lady Pownall's death, he had married again a Mrs. Astell, of Everton House, in County Bedford, and when not on the continent, or at Bath, or some other watering-place, they lived at Everton House, her former home.

The year after he retired from Parliament he published a Treatise on the Study of Antiquities, sketching out a general plan of research, and next an Essay on the Elements of Speech, in which he came very close to the celebrated law concerning the differential mutations of consonants, now called "Grimm's Law." The next year he published a description of the Antiquities of the Provincia Romana of Gaul, and an Account of the Therma and Roman Baths in Baden. In 1795, when seventy-five years of age, he issued Letters advocating, in substance, free trade in grain, and in

this may be detected a confirmation of a step in his former parliamentary career, when he spoke the first word for American wheat ever heard in the House of Commons. The Letters were followed by an Antiquarian Romance, in which he recommends the disregard of traditional methods, and the employment of what he calls "experimental inductive theorems" in the examination of ancient myths—a process which comes near to the methods of modern comparative mythologists. He wrote on numerous other topics, such as Hannibal's Passage of the Alps; a theme, as one sees from Gibbon's Extraits de mon Journal, very attractive to scholars. Even when Pownall was at Bath for his gout, he wrote on the Roman antiquities of that neighborhood in moments of painless idleness.

As his long life drew nearer to its close he became more and more introspective; he now writes on Intellectual Physics, an Essay Concerning the Nature of Being, and last, I think, a treatise on Old Age, no doubt suggested by the De Senectute of Cicero. His writings are not, with the exception of that on the colonies, a fair index of his greatness, although he was esteemed a learned antiquary, and is so called. They show conclusively the wide range of his scholarship, and that he was a Greek scholar of parts and a Latin etymologist of more than common parts. His powers as a philosophical historian were applauded by the Walpoles, whose friend he was, and his knowledge of the exact sciences was sufficiently unusual to make him well heard, even by Franklin. But he was great only as an Americanist, and because he was the first statesman who dealt with American questions; he was the precursor of Jefferson, Webster, and Seward. He was the first man who matured a great American policy, so minutely worked out and so well known to the foreign diplomats of his time, that when the Spanish Americans were in the process of revolt from Spain, their leaders consulted him as the one Englishman who for half a century had best understood the destinies of American nationality. What a tribute to Pownall! What a reprimand to his countrymen who had lost America!

Among the fruits of his later literary labors were two extraordinary productions, in which he spoke with a confidence and a sublimity rarely attempted. They were the vale dicta of a statesman of one age to the ruling authorities of another, to the sovereigns of Europe and to the sovereigns of America, two very different classes, distinguished most carefully and addressed by name. To the sovereigns of Europe he counseled the cultivation of the new American States as the arbiters of future commerce and future power. He predicted the independence of the SpanishAmerican colonies, which soon followed. He recommended to Portugal the project of removing its government to Brazil if it would augment its