This was doubtless the theme on which patriotic orators were enlarging in every city and township of the United States on the 4th of July last-the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Equally, without doubt, if they chanced to be of the "hyphenated" breed, they used it to poison the barbs of shafts directed against Great Britain and her Empire. Yet the legend of British greed and tyranny has long been discredited, and that by the patient labour not of British, but of American historians. In this respect the cause of Anglo-American friendship is indebted in an especial degree to the work of the late Henry Osgood and George Beer, whose teaching and example did so much to raise the school of modern history in Columbia University to its present high level. Osgood, whose early researches had led him to suspect the falseness of the traditional views as to the causes of the American Revolution, devoted his whole life to the study of the history of the American colonies, the result being a monumental work in seven volumes, of which the last four were not published till after his death. Unhappily, though he had selected a field "clearly bounded and not too large for the employ of a life-time," he only lived to carry his work down to the conquest of Quebec. The gap thus left is filled up, partly by his other writings, partly by the work of his colleague, George Beer, whose examination of British colonial policy during the eleven fateful years between 1754 and 1765 is by far the most scholarly, clear and impartial account in existence of the conditions which determined the great disruption.

Both these writers believed this disruption to be inevitable; neither of them, after an exhaustive analysis of all the evidence, would give the slightest support to the legend of " British tyranny' as its cause. So far as historians are concerned, this legend— which had been accepted without question by Bancroft and Fiske -simply wilted under the strong light of truth which the opening of the records enabled impartial minds to throw upon it. But what is convincing to historians is apt to be caviare for the general. "Folk-lore defies the search for truth," says Mr. Guedalla, any age, which has once glowed under its magic touch, is lost to history." In America the change of heart produced by the Great War gave history a chance in its battle with legend, and in this matter of British original sin the school text-books tended to

"and

attune themselves to the new note sounded by historical scholarship. Yet the legend lives, and there are those in the United States who would keep it alive in defiance of history and historians. "It is more important," said a certain Mr. Hirshfield recently to a New York audience," that American children should grow up good Americans than that they should be taught true history."

This doctrine, which is not confined to America, is likely to receive a larger measure of support in the United States than elsewhere owing to the traditional veneration felt for the primal source of the national legend. What Rufus Choate called "the glittering and sounding generalities" of the Declaration of Independence have for a century and a-half been instilled into the minds of successive generations of Americans as the " self-evident truths" which they claimed to be; and the impressive note of infallibility which Thomas Jefferson succeeded in giving to the rolling periods of the preamble has served also to give an air of authority to what Mr. Hirst, his latest biographer, calls the "impressive recital of George the Third's usurpations, which marked him out as a tyrant' unfit to be the ruler of a free people.' It is clearly no easy task to destroy a legend thus parented, entrenched in the very foundation charter of the national liberties, accepted as gospel truth for a century and a-half, and industriously propagated even by Englishmen who really ought to know better. It is the less easy since the Declaration of Independence, in spite of its verbiage and its distortion of truth or perhaps even because of them-was epoch-making both in the history of America and of the world. This was not because the principles it proclaimed were new, for they had long been commonplaces of the philosophers -it was because these principles were now for the first time put forward by the makers and rulers of a nation as the essential foundations of all government. Thus the American Revolution heralded the world revolution, and the Declaration of Independence has become for democrats everywhere, as more particularly for Mr. Hirst," a document which stands in the history of human liberty with Magna Charta."

The barons assembled at Runnymede, it may be hazarded, would have been greatly surprised by the large interpretation which later generations were to put on their action in forcing the king to respect their feudal "liberties." Certainly the greater

number of those who set their hands to the Declaration of Independence would never have done so had they known that it would come to be regarded as the Great Charter of democracy. They were, indeed, very far from being democrats. Their portraits may still be seen in the old State House at Philadelphia, now styled Independence Hall, and for the most part they are those of gentlemen in all the bravery of embroidered coats and lace ruffles, with hair elaborately buckled and powdered-aristocrats to their finger-tips. They hated the whole breed of democrats, as their later attitude towards the French Revolution was to prove. If they accepted Jefferson's glittering generalities, this was partly because they piqued themselves on their philosophy, partly because it suited their immediate purpose to do so. They had no intention, however, of applying the principles to which they subscribed when such application conflicted with their own interests. They could accept the statement that "all men are created equal," because it committed them to nothing; for had not philosophers, from Thomas Aquinas to Christian Wolff, even deduced from this premise, by a perfect logical process, the final argument in favour of absolute monarchy? They were willing enough to deduce from it that the colonists had the same right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as the people of the mother country, which nobody had ever denied, but they boggled at a similar deduction being drawn in the case of the negroes; and so all references to slavery and the slave trade were struck out of the draft.

The same is true of the most famous of the principles formulated in the Declaration, namely, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.* This was a convenient formula for defining the attitude of the colonists in their quarrel with the mother country, but those who signed it had no intention of giving it a universal application. Jefferson himself did not apply it when, as President, he purchased Louisiana from Napoleon. He did not consult the people of Louisiana before completing the purchase, and he governed them without their consent: he said that they were as incapable of self

*According to Mr. Hirst (p. 510) this very disputable proposition was Jefferson's emendation of Algernon Sydney's perfectly sound maxim that "just governments are established for the good of the governed."

government as children." There was, in short, in the minds of the signers of the Declaration none of that passion for logical consistency which has ever impelled the French to apply political principles rigidly in practice. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the delegates at Philadelphia had really grasped the full implications of the principles to which they set their signatures. For this portentous document, drafted by Jefferson with commendable speed, was only debated for three days, and not many changes had been made in it when the debate was cut short by what he described as the " providential intervention" of a swarm of horse-flies, which invaded the hall from a neighbouring mews and bit the delegates so unmercifully through their silk stockings that they were content to sign anything in order to get away,

The immediately important thing, of course, to which all else was subordinated, was the question of independence itself; and the time of Congress had been largely occupied in persuading the delegates of those provinces which still clung to the British connection to take the only course which could ensure the French alliance. For the rest, the Declaration was a mere pièce d'occasion-a magnificent example of war propaganda, which is notoriously economical of truth. Yet in one respect the Declaration did a great service to truth, namely, in basing the justice of the act of secession on an entirely new claim of right. The colonists had originally taken up arms in defence of "the rights of Englishmen" their war-cry was "no taxation without representation"; and, while fighting for these rights, they had continued to protest their loyalty to the Crown and the Empire. It is not necessary to enlarge on the causes which changed this attitude. They are well summed up in a letter of Richard Henry Lee, written on the 2nd of June, 1776, five days before he moved in Congress the first resolution in favour of severing the connection with Great Britain.

It is not choice, then, but necessity (he wrote) that calls for Independence, as the only means by which a foreign Alliance can be obtained and a proper confederation by which internal peace and union may be secured.... Our enemies press us with war, threaten us with danger and slavery. And this, not with her single force, but with the aid of Foreigners.*

This is still an English voice, raised in wrath against Great

*Ballagh, op. cit. I., p. 197.

Britain for not playing the game, for trying to suppress Englishmen, not with her own force, but by the brutality of Hessian mercenaries and barbarous Indian auxiliaries. Yet in the Declaration of Independence the appeal is not to the rights of Englishmen, as defined by the law and by the constitution, but to the Rights of Man, as defined in the speculations of the philosophers.

This change in the claim of right is duly noted by the two American historians, who suggest its true motive. None of the acts complained of in the Declaration, so far as they are correctly described, could be arraigned as contrary to the rights of Englishmen. "There was nothing that can be called tyrannical or unconstitutional," says Professor Osgood, “in the plans of Grenville, Townshend and Lord North. Severe measures were not resorted to till they were provoked by colonial resistance "; and elsewhere he maintains that it was not only the right but the duty of the king to do his best to put down the rebellion. Had he succeeded, he might have anticipated the glory of Lincoln; for even Mr. Guedalla, who revels in pouring ridicule on "Farmer George,' admits that, at least at one moment, " he saw the issue almost with the eyes of 1861." George III may have been over-tenacious of his prerogative, but it was certainly not this alone that made him cling tenaciously to the ideal of national unity.

'As for the specific charges of " tyranny made against him in the Declaration of Independence, their absurdity is often clear enough when they are put to the test of facts. The Declaration, for instance, accuses him of having "refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good." It was, indeed, in connection with such a refusal that he had first been publicly denounced as a tyrant; and the instance is instructive. The colonists had got into the bad habit of attempting to relieve themselves of their private debts by a process of legislative juggling, a process most wholesome for themselves, but very unwholesome for their creditors. Such an attempt was made by the Virginia Act of 1758, which was disallowed by Order in Council in the following year on the ground that its effect was to defraud British merchants and the clergy of Virginia. It was

*Beer, p. 183 seq. In 1764 an Act of Parliament forbade the issue of legal tender paper money in any of the colonies on the ground put forward by the Board of Trade, that "this measure of declaring bills of Credit to be legal Tender was false in its principles, unjust in its foundation, and manifestly fraudulent in its operation.” (Ib. p. 187.)