during the hearing of one of the cases arising out of this Order in Council that that dubious patriot, Patrick Henry, in addressing the jury on behalf of a debtor defendant, told them that " a king, by disallowing acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects' obedience." His motive in saying this, as he afterwards confessed, was to gain popularity; and he succeeded. The legend of British tyranny is thus traceable to a very muddy source.

It is easy enough, in the light of later events, to criticise the handling by the king of a singularly difficult problem. His whole attitude may have been impolitic; blunders enough were doubtless made by him and by his Ministers; but he was not a tyrant. A tyrant, as rightly defined by the schoolmen, is a ruler who despises all restraints of law; and one great fault of George III was, according to Mr. Guedalla, a blind and obstinate insistence on the letter of the law. Nor was the law itself in doubt. It had been recognized from the first that Parliament, by mentioning the dominions in its statutes, could extend their provisions to the colonies; and though, previous to 1760, there had been little occasion to exercise this power, it had been exercised often enough to prevent its being atrophied. Parliament, in short, was admittedly sovereign in the Empire, and sovereignty implies plenary authority to legislate and to tax. The attitude of Pitt, who maintained that the absolute authority of Parliament to legislate for the colonies did not include the right of internal taxation, is described by Mr. Beer as unscientific and illogical. From the point of view of the colonies, he says, the two powers were virtually synonymous, since the chief function of their own legislatures was the levying of taxes. They had never disputed the sovereignty of Parliament; but they had also never realised its full implications, for the power of Parliament to impose direct taxes on the colonies had been held in abeyance. It was not till 1764 and 1765 that they did realise it, and "they groped in the dark for some means of checking the legal omnipotence of that legislative body." In the end, since they could not attack it on legal grounds, they were forced to rely on the current doctrines of natural law, according to which certain rights are inherent in man. These conflicting views, says Mr. Beer, were irreconcilable

*For Pitt's argument, see Egerton, p. 79.

in theory and in practice, and led ultimately to the disruption of the Empire.

The causes of the great disruption, indeed, lay deeper than any resentment at particular assertions of Imperial authority. They lay in the tendency of the colonies to independence, a tendency which was present from the beginning and was increased under the influence of time and distance. In those days of slow and difficult communications the isolation of the colonies was all but complete. They were cut off from the mother country by the whole width of the ocean, and from each other by formidable distances and yet more formidable natural barriers. They differed widely, too, in their origins and in their constitutions, in their customs and their traditions. It is not surprising, then, to be told that their chief common characteristic was an intense particularism. "Pride of race," says Mr. Beer, " had to a great extent disappeared in the colonies, and patriotism was bounded by the physical limits of each province." The Empire was thus a very loosely organized political structure, composed as it was of colonies differing in type, in their economic conditions, and in the measure of self-government they enjoyed. And to this variety of conditions the Imperial Government had studied to adapt itself, being content to leave the colonies very much to themselves so long as they submitted to the restrictions on their trade imposed by the Colonial system, of which the idea was that the benefit of all trade within the Empire should inure to the Empire itself and not to outsiders. To these restrictions the colonists had, on the whole, submitted willingly enough, partly as the price paid for the protection of the British navy, partly because the system gave them exclusive privileges in the markets of Great Britain and the other British dominions. It is noteworthy that the British laws of trade are not included in the list of tyrannous acts charged against the mother country in the Declaration of Independence.

"In an Empire of this kind," says Mr. Beer," one of the most difficult problems is to create an effective system of defence which shall neither bear inequitably upon the taxpayer in the mother country, nor offend the political principles of the colonists." He

*George III is accused of assenting to laws "for cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World." This vague statement,' says Beer," seemingly refers specifically to the Boston Port Bill, and not to the colonial system as a whole." (p. 306, note 2.)

adds that Imperial defence was the rock on which the old Empire was shattered; and, since the same problem confronts the new Empire, it is possible that this, too, may suffer shipwreck on this same rock. Between 1754 and 1765 this problem was raised in its most acute form owing to the struggle with the French for mastery of North America, where the numerical superiority of the British was at the outset more than outweighed by the superior civil and military organization of the French. The menace was imminent; for the French had succeeded in establishing their influence over the Indian " nations," and were busy building forts along the Ohio valley, their object being to link Canada with Louisiana and so to cut off the British coast provinces from all chance of expansion westward. It seemed, however, as if nothing would stir the colonists out of their provincial complacency. Tales of raids and massacres by the French and their Indian allies in the frontier districts of New York left the people of Virginia or the Carolinas cold. Pennsylvania, where the Quaker influence predominated, held virtuously aloof: "The Quakers," wrote a correspondent from Philadelphia at this time, “ are very keen in looking after their own interests."

In view of the refusal of the provincial legislatures to subordinate their sectional interests, or to do anything for the common cause if they could possibly shift the burden on to others, farsighted men in America itself began, even before the outbreak of the official war, to see the necessity for the intervention of Parliament. Benjamin Franklin declared in favour of federation, though not taxation, of the colonies by Act of Parliament.* William Shirley, of Massachusetts, whom Mr. Beer describes as the ablest governor of his time, was strongly in favour of parliamentary union, coupled with parliamentary taxation of the colonies, while the " clear-sighted" governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, in a formal despatch to the Secretary of State, commented bitterly on the selfish particularism of the colonies and said that, if America was not to be lost, there must be of Parliament to oblige each colony to raise by a Pole Tax of a Shilling Sterling or otherways a proportional Quota of a general Sum to be applied to the present Exigency, and paid as the

an Act

This was after the legislatures of all thirteen provinces had rejected the plan of federation drawn up by him and accepted by the

Commissioners assembled at Albany in 1754.

Legislature in Great Britain shall think fit to appoint." Other weighty voices from the colonies gave the same advice, and it is curious to speculate as to what would have happened had the advice been taken and the taxes necessary for the defence of the colonies been imposed by Parliament before, and not after, the removal of the French menace by the conquest of Canada.

The Imperial Government did not follow this advice, though it came "from men of conspicuous ability, who from long and faithful service in the colonies, were seemingly in the best position to advise wisely."* The refusal was not due to any idea of the injustice or the illegality of the plan proposed, for it was a well established principle that the colonies should bear at least part of the cost of their own defence, and a tax laid on them by Parliament seemed the only way of making them pay their due share. Nor was it owing to any failure to realise the seriousness of the situation; for the need for a large increase in the regular forces in America was being emphasized by the fact that not even the imminence of the French danger could stop the mutual jealousies and internecine feuds of the colonies.† It was due to the sound opinion of ministers that the eve of a great war was not an opportune moment for taking any action which might possibly, if not probably, lead to further disunion. "The adoption at such a crisis of a scheme of parliamentary taxation," says Mr. Beer, "would have aroused some opposition in the colonies, though not to the same extent that it did later, after the French danger had been removed by the conquest of Canada." Plans such as Shirley and Dinwiddie proposed would have weakened and not strengthened the Empire; and so, when formal hostilities broke out in 1756, they were laid aside, to be taken up again after the restoration of peace in 1763.

There was more to be said for the resumption of these plans than Mr. Guedalla and the orators of Thanksgiving Day are prepared to admit. Mr. Guedalla is very scornful about this renewed proposal to tax the American colonies. "The ripe intelligence of Mr. Grenville," he says, " had devised some taxes for them. . . . Then the grave leaders of the Whig groups faced

66

*Beer, p. 43. The interests of both Shirley and Dinwiddie were colonial rather than English in the narrow sense.

+In 1755, Massachusetts and New York were engaged in a bitter boundary dispute, which led to riot and bloodshed.

the strange problem (and even Mr. Walpole began to notice that it was a thorny point'). Mr. Grenville had thought of stamps; they thought of tea; few men in England thought of a larger issue." This is less than fair to these gentlemen, who, though not geniuses, were certainly not fools. It was, indeed, precisely because they were thinking of a larger issue that the trouble arose ; for, if nothing but a petty matter of revenue had been involved in this question of colonial taxation, it is certain that they would have dropped it at the first sign of determined opposition. But the issue was a far larger one.

The war had resulted in a vast expansion of the Empire, and the British Government was faced with the problem of its future organization-the adjustment of the laws of trade to the new conditions, the creation of an efficient Imperial administration, and the establishment of an adequate system of Imperial defence. The war had revealed to the full the dangers of the old loose organization of the Empire; for it is hardly too much to say that it was only the indomitable spirit and restless energy of Pitt that had kept the crazy machinery going until the end was won. His correspondence reveals, more especially, the almost hopeless conditions with which he had to contend in the American colonies. It was not to be expected, perhaps, that they should share his Imperial vision, but they seemed blind to all the greater issues of the conflict in which they were engaged. What was in its essence a world-wide struggle between England and Francebetween two types of civilization," says Mr. Beer, "contracted in the narrow vision of the colonies to the dimensions of a local conflict." As for their share in the war, " each colony, fearing to do more than its neighbour, did less than it could." Generals and governors wrote despairingly of the failure of the provincial legislatures to respond adequately to the requisitions of men and supplies. There were honourable exceptions-notably Massachusetts-but "throughout the war it was realized that the colonies as whole were not exerting themselves to the utmost, and that they were inclined to shift the burden of the war upon the shoulders of the British tax-payer." "If in loyalty there is implied any idea of self-sacrifice," says Mr. Beer elsewhere," then this sentiment was to a marked degree absent in the colonies."

There was, indeed, blatant disloyalty, not only to the cause of the Empire but to that of the colonies themselves. The issue