fiery genius of Montcalm.

When once the war was ended by the complete and final overthrow of the French power, and the definite establishment of English supremacy along the whole Atlantic seaboard, the bickering which was always going on between Great Britain and her American subjects, and which was but partially suppressed even when they were forced to join in common efforts to destroy a common foe, broke out far more fiercely than ever. While the colonists were still reaping the aftermath of the contest in the shape of desolating border warfare against those Indian tribes who had joined in the famous conspiracy of Pontiac, the Royal Parliament passed the Stamp Act, and thereby began the struggle that ended in the Revolution.

England's treatment of her American subjects was thoroughly selfish; but that her conduct towards them was a wonder of tyranny, will not now be seriously asserted; on the contrary, she stood decidedly above the general European standard in such matters, and certainly treated her colonies far better than France and Spain did theirs; and she herself had undoubted grounds for complaint in, for example, the readiness of the Americans to claim military help in time of danger, together with their frank reluctance to pay for it. It was impossible that she should be so far in advance of the age as to treat her colonists as equals; they themselves were sometimes quite as intolerant in their behavior towards men of a different race, creed, or color. The New England Puritans lacked only the power, but not the will, to behave almost as badly towards the Pennsylvania Quakers as did the Episcopalian English towards themselves. Yet granting all this, the fact remains, that in the Revolutionary War the Americans stood towards the British as the Protestant peoples stood towards the Catholic powers in the sixteenth century, as the Parliamentarians stood towards the Stewarts in the seventeenth, or as the upholders of the American Union stood towards the confederate slave-holders in the nineteenth; that is, they warred victoriously for the right in a struggle whose outcome vitally affected the welfare of the whole human race. They settled, once for all, that thereafter the people of English stock should spread at will over the world's waste spaces, keeping all their old liberties and winning new ones; and they took the first and longest step in establishing the great principle that thenceforth those Europeans, who by their strength and daring founded new states abroad, should be deemed to have done so for their own profit as freemen, and not for the benefit of their more timid, lazy, or contented brethren who stayed behind.

The rulers of Great Britain, and to a large extent its people, looked upon the American colonies as existing primarily for the good of the mother country: they put the harshest restrictions on American trade in the interests of British merchants; they discouraged the spread of the Americans westward; and they claimed the right to decide for both parties the proportions in which they should pay their shares of the common burdens. The English and Americans were not the subjects of a common sovereign; for the English were themselves the sovereigns, the Americans were the subjects. Whether their yoke bore heavily or bore lightly, whether it galled or not, mattered little; it was enough that it was a yoke to warrant a proud, free people in throwing it off. We could not thankfully take as a boon part only of what we felt to be our lawful due. "We do not claim liberty as a privilege, but challenge it as a right," said the men of New York, through their legislature, in 1764; and all Americans felt with them.

Yet, for all this, the feeling of loyalty was strong and hard to overcome throughout the provinces, and especially in New York. The Assembly wrangled with the royal governor; the merchants and shipmasters combined to evade the intolerable harshness of the laws of trade that tried to make them customers of England only; the householders bitterly resented the attempts to quarter troops upon them; while the soldiers of the garrison were from time to time involved in brawls with the lower ranks of the people, especially the sailors, as the seafaring population was large, and much given to forcibly releasing men taken by the press-gang for the British war-ships; but in spite of everything there was a genuine sentiment of affection and respect for the British crown and kingdom. It is perfectly possible that if British statesmen had shown less crass and brutal stupidity, if they had shown even the wise negligence of Walpole, this feeling of loyalty would have been strong enough to keep England and America united until they had learned how to accommodate themselves to the rapidly changing conditions; but the chance was lost when once a prince like George the Third came to the throne. It has been the fashion to represent this king as a well meaning, though dull person, whose good morals and excellent intentions partially atoned for his mistakes of judgment; but such a view is curiously false. His private life, it is true, showed the very admirable but common-place virtues, as well as the appalling intellectual littleness, barrenness, and stagnation, of the average British green-grocer; but in his public career, instead of rising to the level of harmless and unimportant mediocrity usually reached by the sovereigns of the House of Hanover, he fairly rivaled the Stuarts in his perfidy, wrongheadedness, political debauchery, and attempts to destroy free government, and to replace it by a system of personal despotism. It needed all the successive blunders both of himself and of his Tory ministers to reduce the loyal party in New York to a minority, by driving the moderate men into the patriotic or American camp; and even then the loyalist minority remained large enough to be a formidable power, and to plunge the embryonic state into a ferocious civil war, carried on, as in the Carolinas and Georgia, with even more bitterness than the contest against the British.

The nature of this loyalist party and the strength of the conflicting elements can only be understood after a glance at the many nationalities that in New York were being blended into one. The descendants of the old Dutch inhabitants were still more numerous than those of any other one race, while the French Huguenots, who, being of the same Calvinistic faith, were closely mixed with them, and had been in the land nearly as long, were also plentiful; the Scotch and Scotch- or Anglo-Irish, mostly Presbyterians, came next in point of numbers; the English, both of Old and New England, next; there were large bodies of Germans; and there were also settlements of Gaelic Highlanders, and some Welsh, Scandinavians, etc. Just prior to the Revolution there were in New York city two Episcopalian churches, three Dutch Reformed, three Presbyterian (Scotch and Irish), one French, two German (one Lutheran and one Calvinistic, allied to the Dutch Reformed); as well as places of worship for the then insignificant religious bodies of the Methodists, Baptists (largely Welsh), Moravians (German), Quakers and Jews. There was no Roman Catholic church until after the Revolution; in fact before that date there were hardly any Roman Catholics in the colonies, except in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and in New York they did not acquire any strength until after the War of 1812.

This mixture of races is very clearly shown by the ancestry of the half-dozen great men brought forth by New York during the Revolution. Of these, one, Alexander Hamilton, stands in the very first class of American statesmen; two more, John Jay and Gouverneur Morris, come close behind him; the others, Philip Schuyler, Robert Livingston,