LI. Nov. preacher, whom he sometimes cheered on by name. CHAP. Though smooth and kindly to his inferiors and dependents, he was capable of ordering the most relent- 177 less acts of cruelty; could chide his generals for checking savages in their career as destroyers; and at night, on coming home to his supper and his claret, the friendless man, unloving and unloved, could, with cold, vengeful malice, plan how to lay America in ashes, because he could not have the glory of reducing her to submission. revenue. An opportunity soon offered for the new secretary to unfold his policy. On the sixteenth Burke brought forward a bill for composing the existing troubles, by formally renouncing the pretension to an American "If we are to have no peace," replied Germain, "unless we give up the right of taxation, the contest is brought to its fair issue. I trust we shall draw a revenue from America; the spirit of this country will go along with me in the idea to crush rebellious resistance." As he said this, the orders were already on the way to hire troops of the roytelets of Brunswick and Hesse Cassel, and in defiance of the laws of the empire to raise four thousand recruits in Germany; for if Germain was to crush the Americans, it could not be done by Englishmen. The ministry was the master of parliament, but not of the affections of the English people. Germain's appointment shows how little their sympathies were considered; the administration, as it was now constituted, was the weakest, the least principled, and the most unpopular of that century. The England that the world revered, the England that kept alive in Europe the LI. Nov. CHAP. Vestal fire of freedom, was at this time outside of the government, though steadily gaining political strength. 1775. "Chatham, while he had life in him, was its nerve." Had Grenville been living, it would have included Grenville; it retained Rockingham, Grenville's successor; it had now recovered Grafton, Chatham's successor; and Lord North, who succeeded Grafton, sided with Germain and Sandwich only by spasms, and though he loved his place, was more against his own ministry than for it. The king's policy was not in harmony with the England of the Revolution, nor with that of the eighteenth century, nor with that of the nineteenth. The England of to-day, which receives and brightens and passes along the torch of liberty, has an honest lineage, and springs from the England of the last century; but it had no representative in the ministry of Lord North, or the majority of the fourteenth parliament. America would right herself within a year; Britain and Ireland must wait more than a half century. Still less did the ministry possess the hearts of the people of Ireland; though it controlled a majority of her legislature, and sought to allay discontent by concessions in favor of her commerce and manufactures. The consent of the Irish house of commons was requested to sending four thousand of the troops on the Irish establishment to America, and receiving in their stead four thousand German Protestants. "If we give our consent," objected Ponsonby, in the debate on the twenty fifth of November, "we shall take part against America, contrary to justice, to prudence, and to humanity." "The war is unjust," said Fitzgibbons, " and Ireland has no reason to be a party therein." Sir LI. Nov. Edward Newenham could not agree to send more CHAP. troops to butcher men who were fighting for their liberty; and he reprobated the introduction of foreign 1775. mercenaries as equally militating against true reason and sound policy. "If men must be sent to America," cried George Ogle, "send there foreign mercenaries, not the brave sons of Ireland." Hussey Burg condemned the American war as "a violation of the law of nations, the law of the land, the law of humanity, the law of nature; he would not vote a single sword without an address recommending conciliatory measures; the ministry, if victorious, would only establish a right to the harvest when they had burned the grain." Yet the troops were voted by one hundred and twenty one against seventy six, although the resolution to replace them by foreign Protestants was negatived by sixty eight against one hundred and six. The majority in parliament did not quiet Lord Dec. North. Sir George Saville describes him "as one day for conciliation; but as soon as the first word is out, he is checked and controlled, and instead of conciliation out comes confusion." On the first day of December, he pressed to a second reading the American prohibitory bill, which consolidated the three special acts against the port of Boston, the fisheries, and the trade of the southern colonies, and enlarged them into a prohibition of all the trade of all the thirteen colonies. American vessels and goods were made the property of their captors; the prisoners might be compelled to serve the king even against their own countrymen. No one American grievance was removed; but commissioners were to be appointed to accept the submission of the colonies, or parts of colonies, Dec. CHAP. one by one; with power to grant pardons to individLI. uals or to a whole community in the lump. The 1775. atrocity of the measure was exposed in the house of commons, but without effect; on the third reading, in the house of lords, Mansfield explained his own views, which in their essential features were also those of the king: "The people of America are as much bound to obey the acts of the British parliament as the inhabitants of London and Middlesex. I have not a doubt in my mind, that ever since the peace of Paris the northern colonies have been meditating a state of independence on this country. But allowing that all their professions are genuine, that every measure hitherto taken to compel submission to the parliamentary authority of this country was cruel and unjust, yet what, my lords, are we to do? Are we to rest inactive with our arms across, till they shall think proper to begin the attack, and gain strength to do it with effect? We are now in such a situation that we must either fight or be pursued. As a Swedish general said to his men of their enemy, 'If you do not kill them, they will kill you;' if we do not, my lords, get the better of America, America will get the better of us. Are we to stand idle, because we are told this is an unjust war? I do not consider who was originally in the wrong; we are now only to consider where we are. The justice of the cause must give way to our present situation; and the consequences which must ensue should we recede, would, nay must be, infinitely worse, than any we have to dread by pursuing the present plan, or agreeing to a final separation." After these words the bill was adopted without a division. LI. 1775. From the beginning of the troubles, George the CHAP. Third had regarded the renunciation of the colonies as preferable to the continuance of the connection on the American principles; for such a continuance would have overturned or endangered his system of government at home. To him it was an option between losing the brightest jewel in his crown, or losing the crown itself, in so far as it was an emblem of monarchical power. The same consideration animated Fox and Rockingham to defend American liberty as the bulwark of the rights of the British people. If a cordial reconciliation should not be speedily effected, to lose America entirely seemed to them a less evil than to hold her as a conquered country; for the maintaining of that dominion by an army only would inevitably terminate in the downfall of the constitution. Outside of parliament, the most intelligent among the philosophers of North Britain yielded to the ministerial measures a reluctant acquiescence or discountenanced them by open rebuke. The lukewarm Presbyterian, William Robertson, whose smooth style in his more elaborate pages is like satin without a crease, and whose discreet method in history palliated or veiled the enormities of the Spaniards, forgot how well he had written at the time when the men in power were repealing the stamp act. "If the wisdom of government could now terminate the contest with honor instantly," he thought "that would be the most desirable issue;" but yet he would have the British "leaders at once exert the power of the British empire in its full force." He would even have approved stationing a "few regiments in each capital." |