Churchill's bouncing couplets, made it a complaint against his country

"That she is rigid in denouncing to death

On petty robbers, and indulges life

And liberty, and ofttimes honor too,

To peculators of the public gold;

That thieves at home must hang, but he that puts

Into his overgorged and bloated purse

The wealth of Indian provinces escapes.'

-THE TASK, Book I."

Goldwin Smith-The United States, p. 73:

"Separation, again be it said, was inevitable. It was too likely that, the vision of statesmanship being clouded as it was respecting the relation of colonies to the mother country, the separation would be angry and violent. Still it might conceivably have been amicable, and that dark page might possibly have been torn from the book of destiny. Woe, we say, to them by whom the offence came and through whose immediate agency, culpable in itself, the two great families of our race were made and to a deplorable extent have remained enemies instead of being friends, brethren, and fellow-workers in the advancement of their common civilization. Woe to the arbitrary and bigoted king whose best excuse is that he had not made himself a ruler instead of being what nature intended him to be, a ploughman. Woe to Grenville, who though not wicked or really bent on depriving the colonies of their rights, but on the contrary most anxious after his fashion to promote their interests, was narrow, pedantic, overbearing, possessed with extravagant ideas of the authority of Parliament, and unstatesmanlike enough to insist upon doing because it was technically lawful that which the sagacity of Walpole had on the ground of practical expediency refused to do. Woe above all to Charles Townshend, who with his vain brilliancy and his champagne speeches, repeated in the face of recent and decisive experience the perilous experiment and recklessly renewed the quarrel. Woe to Lord North, and all the more because in stooping to do the will of the king he was sinning against the light of good nature and good sense in himself. Woe even to Mansfield, whose supremely legal intellect too ably upheld the letter of the law against policy and the right. Woe to the Parliament—a parliament, be it ever remembered, of rotten boroughs and of nominees not of the nation-which

carelessly or insolently supported the evil resolution of the ministry and the court. Woe to the Tory squires who shouted for the war, to the Tory parsons who preached for it, and to the Tory bishops who voted for it in the House of Lords. Woe to the pamphleteers of prerogative, such as Johnson, whose vituperative violence added fuel to the flame. But woe also to the agitators in Boston, who, with the design of independence unavowed and of which they themselves were perhaps but half conscious, did their utmost to push the quarrel to extremity and to quench the hope of reconciliation. Woe to the preachers of Boston, who whether from an exaggerated dread of prelacy or to win the favor of the people made themselves the trumpeters of discord and perverted the gospel into a message of civil war. Woe to contraband traders, if there were any, who sought in fratricidal strife relief from trade restrictions; to debtors, if there were any, who sought in it a sponge for debt. Woe to all on either side, who under the influence of passion, interest, or selfish ambition fomented the quarrel which rent asunder the English race.

"The chief fomenter of the quarrel in the South, not less glorified than Samuel Adams, was Patrick Henry. This man also had tried various ways of earning a livelihood, and had failed in all. He was bankrupt at twenty-three, and lounged in thriftless idleness till he found that he could live by his eloquent tongue. The circle in which as a Virginian, not of the highest class, he formed his statesmanship is described by an American biographer as having comprised an occasional clergyman, pedagogue, or legislator; small planters and small traders; sportsmen, loafers, slaves, and drivers of slaves, and, more than all this, the bucolic sons of old Virginia, the good-natured, illiterate, thriftless Caucasian consumers of tobacco and whiskey, who, cordially consenting that all the hard work should be done by the children of Ham, were thus left free to commune together in endless debate on the tavern porch, or on the shady side of the country store. In Virginia admission to the legal profession might be gained without laborious study of the law. Henry's first exploit as a barrister was a successful defence of the spoliation of the clergy, an unpopular order, by an appeal to public passion against legal right. Civil discord brought him at once to the front. His famous speech against the tyranny of George III. is often recited: Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.' When he said, Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of

chains and slavery?' he stood, as an eye-witness has told us, in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom; his form was bowed, his wrists were crossed, his manacles were almost visible as he stood like an embodiment of helplessness and agony. After a solemn pause he raised his eyes and chained hands toward heaven, and prayed in words and tones that thrilled every heart, Forbid it, Almighty God!' Mentally struggling with the tyranny, he looked, the same witness tells us, like' Laocoon in a death struggle with the coiling serpents.' 'The sound of his voice was like that of a Spartan pæan on the field of Platæa, and as each syllable of the word liberty' echoed through the building, his fetters were shivered, his arms were pulled apart, and the links of his chain were scattered to the winds. He stood like a Roman senator defying Cæsar, while the unconquerable spirit of Cato of Utica flashed from every feature, and he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words, Or give me death,' which sounded with the awful cadence of a hero's dirge, fearless of death, and victorious in death; and he suited the action to the word by a blow upon the left breast with the right hand, which seemed to drive the dagger to the patriot's heart.'

"It is no wonder that Patrick Henry could so vividly portray to his audience the attitude of a slave. From the beginning to the end of his life he was a slaveholder; he bought slaves, he sold slaves, and by his will, with his cattle, he bequeathed slaves. A eulogist says of him that he could buy or sell a horse or a negro as well as anybody. That he was in some degree conscious of the inconsistency does not alter the fact. Other patriot orators besides Patrick Henry, when they lavished the terms slave and slavery in their revolutionary harangues, might have reflected that they had only to look round them in order to see what real slaves and slavery were."

Tyler-Patrick Henry:

"Among the papers left by him at his death was one significantly placed by the side of his will, carefully sealed, and bearing this superscription: Inclosed are the resolutions of the Virginia Assembly in 1766, concerning the Stamp Act. Let my executors open this paper. On opening the document, his executors found on one side of the sheet the first five resolutions in the famous series introduced by him; and on the other side these weighty words: The within resolutions passed the house of burgesses in May, 1765. They formed