from the beginning to regulate their domestic affairs according to their own conception of their interests; and they were contented to leave their foreign affairs in the hands of the mother country in return for her protection. But they felt that that protection was no free gift; that the restrictions which they accepted for their commerce and manufactures transmuted every shilling which the English treasury expended on their behalf into pounds of profit for the English merchant and manufacturer. Dependence in this form they could submit to, for, though sometimes pushed to the verge of oppression, there was no humiliation in it. It was the dependence of the industrious child upon the thrifty parent; a habit outliving the necessity whence it sprang. And they had too much of the English love of precedent and English reverence for law about them to wish for any changes which did not seem to be the necessary consequence of acknowledged facts. They loved their mother country with the love of children, who, forsaking their homes under strong provocation, turn back to them in thought, when time has blunted the sense of injury, with a lively recollection of early associations and endearments, -a tenderness and a longing not altogether free from self-reproach. To go to England was to go home. To have been there was a claim to especial consideration. They studied English history as the beginning of their own; a first chapter which all And must master thoroughly who would understand the sequel. England's literature was their literature. Her great men were their great men. when her flag waved over them, they felt as if the spirit which had borne it in triumph over so many bloody fields had descended upon them with all its inspiration and all its glory. They gave English names to their townships and counties; and if a name had been ground enough to build a pretension upon, more than one English noble, who already numbered his acres in the Old World by thousands, might have claimed tens of thousands in the new. They loved to talk of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; and, with the Hudson and the Potomac before their eyes, could hardly persuade themselves that the Thames was not the first of rivers. More especially did they rejoice to see Englishmen and converse with them. The very name was a talisman that opened every door, broke down the barriers of the most exclusive circle, and transformed the dull retailer of crude opinions and stale jests into a critic and a wit. - In nine years, years full of incident, and which passed so rapidly that the keenest eye was unable to see what a mighty work they were doing,all this was changed radically and forever. The thirteen Colonies became thirteen United States, with a name and a flag, and allies, and a history of their own; great men of their own to point to, great deeds of their own to commemorate, and the recollection of common sacrifices and a common glory to bind them together. And scarcely had this great change been completed when the French Revolution came; and then for a time the splendor of the American Revolution seemed to have been eclipsed by the variety and magnitude of the events which followed it. Men forgot, as is their wont, what their fathers had done, that they might magnify their own achievements. Their eyes were too much dazzled by the meteors that were flashing before them, to feel the full force of the clear and steady light that was shining on them from the past. But History forgets not. In her vast treasurehouse are garnered all the fruits and all the seeds of civilization. At her awful tribunal men await in silent expectation, face to face with their deeds. She assigns to each his place, apportions to each his reward; and when the solemn moment arrives wherein it is permitted to lift the veil from human errors and frailties, and give to man and to circumstances their due part in the production of events, the wondrous chain of causes and effects stretches out before us into the deepest recesses of the past, uniting by indissoluble links the proud aspiration of to-day with the hope that was breathed, half formed and almost indefinite, three thousand years ago. In this light the American Revolution has, at last, taken its place in history, both as cause and as effect; receiving its impulse from the past, and transmitting it with a constantly increasing power to a future yet unrevealed. What now was the cause of this rapid change in the opinions and affections of three millions of men, ---a change so complete as almost to justify the opinion, that it was the work of design from the beginning? How was confidence transformed into suspicion, loyalty into aversion, submission and love into defiance and hatred? How could statesmen be so ignorant of the common laws of our nature, as to suppose that the industry which had been fostered by security could survive the sense of security? How could philosophers so far forget the force of general principles, as to suppose that the descendants of men who, when few in number and hard pressed by poverty, had preferred a wilderness for their home to a yoke for their consciences, should so far belie their blood as tamely to renounce their birthright when they were become a powerful people, and had made that wilderness a garden? And here, at the threshold of our inquiry, we must pause a moment to remember that nothing is so fatal to a correct understanding of history as the blending and confounding of the two classes of causes which underlie all human events. For while every occurrence may be traced back to some immediate antecedent, it belongs also as a part to those great classes of events, which, gathering into themselves the results of whole periods, enable us to assign to nations and epochs, as well as to incidents and individuals, their appropriate place in the progress of humanity. Keeping, therefore, this distinction in view, wel find the first cause of alienation in the colonial system itself. This system had grown up gradually and almost imperceptibly; beginning with a few feeble colonists scattered over a vast extent of territory, or clustering here and there in towns which, in Europe, would hardly have passed for villages. These colonists had no wish to dissolve their legal connection with England. Reverence for law and precedent, as I have already hinted, was a national characteristic; an inborn sense which they had inherited from their fathers, and could not eradicate without changing their whole nature. They still trod and loved to tread in the footsteps which they knew. The beaten track was a safe and a plain track, full of pleasant associations, fa... miliar to their eyes and dear to their hearts. With this under their feet they walked firmly, like men who know what is behind them and what is before. They had brought with them the common law, and, as far as the difference of circumstances permitted, followed its precepts. They had brought their municipal forms with them, and adapted them to the wants of their new home. And above all, they had brought with them the animating princi ple, the vital spirit of those laws and forms, the |