Surmary. they caulk their ships, would they even litter their horses with wool, if it were not both plenty and cheap? And what signifies the dearness of labor when an English shilling passes for five-and-twenty? Their engaging three hundred silk throwsters here in one week for New York was treated as a fable, because, forsooth, they have 'no silk there to throw.' Those, who make this objection, perhaps do not know, that, at the same time the agents from the King of Spain were at Quebec to contract for one thousand pieces of cannon to be made there for the fortification of Mexico, and at New York engaging the usual supply of woollen floor carpets for their West India houses, other agents from the Emperor of China were at Boston treating about an exchange of raw silk for wool, to be carried in Chinese junks through the Straits of Magellan. "And yet all this is as certainly true, as the account said to be from Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery 'this summer in the upper Lakes.' Ignorant people may object, that the upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt-water fish; but let them know, Sir, that cod, like other fish when attacked by their enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales, when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.' This passage is noteworthy as an early instance of what we now call American humor, the grave statement, with a sober face, of obviously preposterous nonsense. Though its style is almost Addisonian, its substance is more like what in our own days has given world-wide popularity to Mark Twain. The character of Franklin is too considerable for adequate treatment in any such space as ours; but perhaps we have seen enough to understand how human nature tended to develop in eighteenth-century America, where for a time economic and social pressure was so relaxed. Devoting himself with unceasing energy, common-sense, and tact to practical matters, and never seriously concerning himself with eternity, Franklin developed into a living example of such rational, kindly humanity as the philosophy of revolutionary France held attainable by whoever should be freed from the distorting influence of accidental and outworn institutions. In Jonathan Edwards we found theoretical Puritanism proclaiming more uncompromisingly than ever that human nature is totally depraved. At that very time Franklin, by living as well and as sensibly as he could, was getting himself ready to face the eternities, feeling, as he wrote to President Stiles, that "having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness." The America which in the same years bred Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin bred too the American Revolution. The Revolution a VII THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION REFERENCES (a) HISTORY GOOD SHORT ACCOUNTS: Channing, Student's History, Chapters iv and v. Note the bibliographical references at the beginning of each chapter, and especially the lists of "Illustrative Material." Hart, Formation of the Union, Chapters i, iii, iv. Bibliographical lists at the beginning of each chapter. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 56a, 56b, 133-136; Justin Winsor, The Reader's Handbook of the American Revolution (17611783), Boston: Houghton, 1880; Winsor's America, Vols. VI and VII. Vol. VIII (p. 469 ff.) contains a very full list of "Printed Authorities on the History of the United States, 1775-1850.” (b) LITERATURE LITERARY HISTORY: The great book on the literature of the Revolutionary period is M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 vols., New York: Putnam, 1897. Whoever cannot read all of Tyler may well select Chapters i, x § vi, xiii, xv, xxi, xxv, xxvi, xxix. SELECTIONS: Hart, Contemporaries, II, Parts vi-viii, especially Nos. 131, 149, 167, 196; Stedman and Hutchinson, Vol. III, especially pp. 91-98, 113-116, 175–180, 186–205, 218-219, 236-251, 338–361. THE war which began at Lexington and ended six Civil War. years later with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown has too often been considered a rising against a foreign invader. No error could be much graver. Up to 1760 the colonies of America were on the whole loyal to the crown of England. England, of course, was separated from America by the Atlantic Ocean; and, so far as time goes, the North Atlantic of the eighteenth century was wider than the equatorial Pacific is to-day. But the peo ple of the American colonies were as truly compatriots of Englishmen as the citizens of our Southern States in 1860 were compatriots of New England Yankees. The Revolution, in short, was a civil war, like the wars of Cavaliers and Roundheads a century before in England, or the war in our own country between 1861 and 1865. And like most civil wars it was partly due to honest misunderstanding. The two sides used the same terms in dispute, but they applied them to widely different things. "" and the stood each Take, for example, one of the best-remembered phrases England of the period, "No taxation without representation.' Colonies What does this really mean? To the American mind of misunderto-day, as to the mind of the revolutionary leaders in King other. George's colonies, it means that no town or city or other group of men should be taxed by a legislative body to which it has not actually elected representatives, generally resident within its limits. To the English mind of 1770, on the other hand, it simply meant that no British subject should be taxed by a body where there was not somebody to represent his case. This view, the traditional one of the English Common Law, was held by the Loyalists of America. When the revolutionists complained that America elected no representatives to Parliament, the loyalists answered that neither did many of the most populous towns in the mother country; and that the interests of those towns were perfectly well cared for by members elected elsewhere. If anybody inquired what members of Parliament were protecting the interests of the American. colonies, the loyalists would have named the elder Pitt, Fox, and Burke, and would have asked whether New England or Virginia could have exported to Parliament representatives in any respect superior. The Reaso.1 for this Misunder standing. So it was in regard to other important questions of government: Englishmen and Americans in 1775 were honestly unable to understand one another. The reason for this disagreement was that by 1775 the course of American history had made our conception of legal rights different from that of the English. We had developed local traditions of our own, which we believed as immemorial as ever were the local traditions of the mother country. The question of representation, for example, was not abstract; it was one of established constitutional practice, which had taken one form in England and another very different form in America. So when discussion arose, Englishmen meant one thing by "representation” and Americans meant something else. Misunderstanding followed, a family quarrel, a civil war, and world disunion. Beneath this world disunion, all the while, is a deeper fact, binding America and England truly together at heart,-each really believed itself to be asserting the rights which immemorial custom had sanctioned. We can now perhaps begin to see what the American Revolution means. By 1775, the national experience which had been accumulating in England from the days of Queen Elizabeth had brought the temper of the native English to a state very remote from what this native temper had been under the Tudor sovereigns. Meanwhile, the lack of economic pressure to which we have given the name of national inexperience had kept the original American temper singularly unaltered. When at last, on the accession of George III, legal and constitutional questions were presented in the same terms to English-speaking temperaments on different sides of the Atlantic, these tem |