ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made and still must preserve the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great security of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office and your instructions and your spending clauses are the things that hold together this great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them; it is the spirit of the English constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, and vivifies every part of the empire even down to the minutest member."

To turn from these noble words, pregnant with deep political wisdom, to the personalities of Fox, is to come forth from a great symphony into the midst of a vulgar street brawl. Yet Fox was probably right in not attempting higher work than that of the dashing cavalry officer. The Rupert of debate, he could lead a charge and win a victory, but not as yet determine a policy or plan a campaign. To open the eyes of England to the vast issues which lay hid under the narrow legal limits of the American question, required the moral earnestness as well as the political imagination of a Chatham or a Burke, and moral earnestness to be anything but hypocrisy must be based on moral conviction. The time had not yet come when Fox could lay claim to that. True he could lament, like Mirabeau, of the errors of his youth, but, like Mirabeau,

he could not put them away. Though not the gambler that he had been before the crisis of 1774, Newmarket and Almack's still took up most of the time which was not devoted to Parliament. "He had abandoned," says Walpole of him in 1776, "neither his gaming nor his rakish life, and was seldom in bed before five in the morning, nor out of it before two at noon." It was in the following year that he visited Paris and made such an unfavourable impression upon Madame du Deffand. It was not therefore surprising that men of fashion and politicians refused to believe in the sincerity of his new convictions, though they were quite ready to acknowledge the increased power of his oratory. Even a political opponent like Lord North so little believed him to be serious as to congratulate him after one of his most scathing denunciations of Lord George Germaine, in the very hearing of his victim, with a joke. "Charles, I am glad you did not fall on me to-day, for you was in full feather."

CHAPTER III.

THE FALL OF LORD NORTH.

1777-1782.

THE surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga on the 17th of October, 1777, put an end to the possibility of the reduction of America by force of arms. The alliance with France which followed hard upon it secured her independence. Englishmen, under the leadership of the single-minded King and his venal followers, had set about the coercion of thirteen colonies with as light a heart as they would order out the military to suppress a street riot. From the first they persisted in attributing the resistance which they met with to a few disloyal lawyers and politicians who were bent on independence. They would not believe that they had to deal with a nation determined to maintain its liberties. They did not realize how difficult it was to coerce into submission a country between whose shores and their own flowed three thousand

miles of ocean. That terrible ocean they thought could be bridged if it could not be drained, and America had no fleet with which to dispute with England for the supremacy of the sea. They never stopped to think what the result of their victory was to be. They might indeed, with the help of German mercenaries and Indian savages,

crush the hasty levies of Washington in the field, but that was merely the beginning of difficulties. It was hard enough, as every English statesman knew, to hold Ireland down with all the help which a powerful English garrison of landowners, the long tradition of Protestant ascendency, and eighty years of the grossest legal tyranny could give. Was it conceivable that a united America, the children of Smith, and of Winthrop, and of Penn, would ever submit to be the slaves of a penal code? Was it reasonable to expect that an army of twelve, or of twenty, or of fifty thousand men could thus hold down by force a growing and vigorous nationality three thousand miles away? Force, as Burke pointed out, is not the only nor the truest sanction of government. Besides the appeal to physical force there must always be the appeal to moral right; justice must go hand in hand with power, if peace is to be the result. The case for the Ministry depended wholly upon two assumptions-that it was not the nation, but a factious minority, which had taken up arms against its sovereign, and that the military and naval superiority of England was so great, that the geographical difficulties in the way of conquest could be overcome. The events of the first two years of the war showed that both assumptions were erroneous. The assembling of the Congress, and the Declaration of Independence, proved the union of the Colonies. The surrender of Saratoga showed that in America colonists and loyalists could fight, to say the least, on equal terms. The treaty with France put in daily jeopardy the command of the sea, which was essential to the carrying on of hostilities by England at all.

Lord North saw the abyss which was opening before him. In February, 1778, he carried through Parliament proposals for conciliation, which would have been welcomed in America in 1774, and which were substantially the

same as those proposed by Burke in 1775. Secret communications were opened with Franklin in Paris, but Franklin replied that it was now too late. The public avowal of the treaty between France and America a few days afterwards more than justified his words. To be too late is the attribute of all incompetent Ministers. In 1778 Lord North proposed too late terms which would nave been accepted in 1775. In 1782 the King had to agree to the independence which he had refused to consider in 1778. From the date of the treaty with France it was clear that America would accept no terms short of independence, and it was equally clear that England could not force other terms upon her, as long as France supplied her with money. After the death of Chatham in May, 1778, it became a settled principle with the Opposition that the acknowledgment of American independence was a measure absolutely inevitable, and therefore wise. Though no definite motion was made by Fox by way of pledging the House to this policy, the main gist of all his speeches on the American question, delivered subsequently to 1778, was to show the impossibility of conquering America, and the absolute necessity of making peace. Once in 1779, and twice in 1781, he urged this directly with all his powers upon Parliament, and as it was universally admitted that peace at that time could only be obtained by the grant of independence, there could be no doubt as to which way his opinion pointed. In 1781 he said as much openly :

"As to the mere single proposition whether America might with propriety be declared independent, abstracted from other considerations, it is perfectly ridiculous to debate about it in the House this evening. America, as the right honourable gentleman has confessed, is already independent, and, as he well observed from one point of view, ought to be considered as a public enemy. I most heartily agree with the right honourable gentleman that she is independent; I may possibly disagree