crushed ere the dispute will be ended." The commons unhesitatingly confirmed their vote of the previous night.

Among the lords, Shelburne spoke of the petition of the congress as the fairest ground for an honorable and advantageous accommodation; and of Franklin as one whom "he had long and intimately known, and had ever found constant and earnest in the wish for conciliation upon the terms of ancient connection." His words were a prophecy of peace, and of himself and Franklin as its mediators; but on that night he was overborne by a majority of two to one. Some of the mi nority entered a protest, in which they said: "We conceive the calling in foreign forces to decide domestic quarrels to be a measure both disgraceful and dangerous."

That same day the university of Oxford, the favored printer of the translated Bible for all whose mother tongue was the English, the natural guardian of the principles and the example of Wycliffe and Latimer and Ridley and Cranmer, the tutor of the youth of England, addressed the king against the Americans as "a people who had forfeited their lives and fortunes to the justice of the state."

On the last day of October, Lord Stormont, the British ambassador, was received at the French court. The king of France, whose sympathies were all on the side of monarchical power, said to him: "Happily the opposition party is now very weak." From the king, Stormont went to Vergennes, who expressed the desire to live in perfect harmony with England; "far from wishing to increase your embarrassments," said he, "we see them with some uneasiness." "The consequences," observed Stormont, "cannot escape a man of your penetration and extensive views.” "Indeed, they are very obvious," responded Vergennes; "they are as obvious as the consequences of the cession of Canada. I was at Constantinople when the last peace was made; when I heard its conditions, I told several of my friends there that England would ere long have reason to repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. My prediction has been but too well verified. I equally see the consequences that must follow the independence of North America, if your colonies should carry that point, at which they now so visibly

aim. They might, when they pleased, conquer both your islands and ours. I am persuaded that they would not stop there, but would in process of time advance to the southern continent of America, and either subdue its inhabitants or carry them along with them, and in the end not leave a foot of that hemisphere in the possession of any European power. All these consequences will not indeed be immediate: neither you nor I shall live to see them; but for being remote they are not less sure."

On the first of November the duke of Manchester said to the lords: "The violence of the times has wrested America from the British crown, and spurned the jewel because the setting appeared uncouth;" but the debate which he opened had no effect except that Grafton took part with him, and as a consequence resigned his place as keeper of the privy seal. On the tenth Richard Penn was called to the bar of the house of lords, where he bore witness in great detail to the sincerity of the American congress in their wish for conciliation, and to the unanimity of support which they received from the people. The duke of Richmond proposed to accept the petition from that congress to the king as a ground for conciliation; he was ably supported by Shelburne; but his motion, like every similar motion in either house, was negatived by a majority of

about two to one.

On the same day Rochford retired on a pension, making way for Lord Weymouth, who greatly surpassed him in ability and resolution. Dartmouth took the privy seal, but without a seat in the cabinet. The American department was transferred to Lord George Sackville Germain, who concentrated in himself all the political patronage of the house of Dorset, and promised to carry out the measures recommended by him in the house of commons on the twenty-eighth of March 1774. The man thus selected to conduct the civil war in America stood before Europe as an officer cashiered for cowardice on the field of battle. George II., who was brave and a strict disciplinarian, thought the sentence just, and was inexorable toward him. His admission to court at the accession of George III. confirmed the rupture between Pitt and the earl of Bute. He owed his rehabilitation to Rockingham, to whom he instantly proved false. Chat

ham would never sit with him at the council board. Haunted by corroding recollections and stupidly self-confident, he entered on the high office, for which he was of all men the least competent; eager to efface his ignominy by rivalling the career of Pitt in the seven years' war. But he had not any one quality that fitted him for an important military office: so that his appointment was of the very best augury for the insurgent Americans. Minutely precise and formal, he had a feverish activity, punctuality to a minute, and personal application, but no sagacity, nor quick perception, nor soundness of judgment, nor that mastery over others which comes from force of character and warmth of heart. He could not plan a campaign, and was a most uncomfortable chief, always proposing to the general officers under his direction measures which they had not the means to execute, and always throwing upon them the fault of failure. His rancor toward those at whom he took offence was bitter and unending; his temper petulant, and ruled by passions violent and constant, yet petty in their objects. Apparelled on Sunday morning in gala, as if for the drawingroom, he constantly marched out all his household to his parish church, where he would mark time for the singing gallery, chide a rustic chorister for a discord, stand up during the sermon to survey the congregation or overawe the idle, and gesticulate approbation to the preacher, or cheer him by name.

The capacity of Germain had been greatly overrated. He was restless and loved intrigue; ambitious, opinionated, and full of envy; when he spoke, it was arrogantly, as if to set others right; his nature combined contemptuous haughtiness toward his inferiors and subordinates, and meanness of spirit. Without fidelity, fixed principles, or logical clearness of mind, unfit to conduct armies or affairs, he joined cowardice with love of superiority and "malevolence" toward those who thwarted or opposed him. He was rich; but in a period of corrupt government he was distinguished for the inordinate gratification of his own cupidity in the exercise of his powers of patronage and confiscation. Though smooth and kindly to his inferiors and dependants, he was capable of ordering the most atrocious acts of cruelty; could rebuke his generals for checking savages in their fury 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, since he knew not how to reduce her to submission.

Germain's appointment shows how little the sympathies of the English people were considered; the administration, as it was now constituted, was the weakest, the most destitute of principles, and the most unpopular of that century. The England that the world revered, the England that kept alive in Europe the vestal fire of freedom, was at this time outside of the government, though steadily gaining political strength. "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. 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.

How completely the ministry were stumbling along without a policy appeared from the debates. On the eighth Lord Barrington asked of the house in a committee of supply an appropriation for twenty-five thousand men to be employed in America, and said with seeming authority of a minister: "The idea of taxing America is entirely given up; the only consideration is how to secure the constitutional dependency of that country. The general plan adopted by administration is first to arm, and then send out commissioners." But when Lord North, on the thirteenth, in a committee of supply moved the full tax of four shillings in the pound on land, he had to encounter and overcome the rankling discontent of the landed gentry, for whom a reduction of a shilling in the pound of the land-tax was to have been the first fruits of their support of the American measures, and he spoke in this wise: "When his majesty's ministers said that the idea of taxation was aban

doned, they never intended by that expression more than that taxation is but a matter of secondary consideration, when the supremacy and legislative authority of this country are at stake. Taxation is not, nor ever was out of their view. It should be insisted on and enforced, to insure your legislative authority, though no kind of advantage should arise from it." The explanation gave satisfaction; Lord North retained support by a sacrifice of his opinions and of America.

On the sixteenth Burke brought forward a bill for composing the existing troubles by renouncing the pretension to an American revenue. "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 recruits in Germany; for, if Britain was to crush the Americans, it could not be done by Englishmen.

In Ireland the ministry controlled a majority of her legisla ture, 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 twentyfifth of November, "we shall take part against America, contrary to justice, to prudence, and to humanity." "The war is unjust," said Fitzgibbon, " and Ireland has no reason to be a party therein." Sir Edward Newenham could not agree to send more troops to butcher men who were fighting for their liberty; and he reprobated the introduction of foreign mercenaries as equally militating against true reason and sound policy. "If men must be sent to America," cried George Ogle, "send foreign mercenaries, not the sons of Ireland." Hussey Burgh 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