peasant in Great Britain was less happy than the slave in America, resented-whatever their own attitude to slavery might be-the tone adopted by British writers in discussing the question of abolition. The wonder, indeed, is that our critical travellers did not do more harm than they actually did; and it is pleasant to find that Professor Daubeny, of Oxford, who printed for private circulation in 1843 a 'Journal of a Tour through the United States and Canada' (made in 1837-8), was impressed by the assurances of attachment to England which he received and by the friendly discussions which he heard everywhere about 'Brougham, Canning, Melbourne, and the little Queen.'

If the travellers were often insulting in their tone towards America, a corrective could be found not only in English reviews of their productions, but also in many incidental remarks scattered through the writings of our great poets and men of letters. Wordsworth, in 'Ruth,' described the youth from Georgia as having fought for the colonists and as coming to England 'when America was free'; and in the Tract on the Convention of Cintra he said: In the course of the last thirty years, we have seen two wars waged against Liberty-the American war, and the war against the French people in the early stages of their Revolution.' He censured the 'presumptuous irreverence of the principles of justice, and blank insensibility to the affections of human nature, which determined the conduct of our government,' and he praised the American spirit of resistance, 'subtle, ethereal, mighty, incalculable.' Shelley in the 'Revolt of Islam' (1818) described America as the home of freedom:

'Yes, in the desert there is built a home

For Freedom. Genius is made strong to rear
The monuments of man beneath the dome
Of a new heaven; myriads assemble there
Whom the proud lords of man, in rage or fear,
Drive from their wasted homes.'

6

Southey, who wrote the Quarterly' article from which Irving quoted, composed, during the war of 1812-1814, an Ode in which he attacked not the people of the United

States but the rulers who afflicted with their misrule the indignant land

'Where Washington hath left
His aweful memory

A light for after times;'

and he prophesied their repudiation by their own countrymen. Byron, in his 'Ode on Venice' (1818), wrote a eulogy on America, whose people were 'nursed in the devotion of Freedom,' which their fathers had fought for and bequeathed. Coleridge, who, like other people in this country, was intensely irritated by the shallowness and vulgar incivility of English visitors to the United States,' described America in 1829 as 'Britain with elbow-room and doubly free':

6

'Each heaven-sanctioned tie the same,

Laws, manners, language, faith, ancestral blood,
Domestic honour, awe of womanhood.'

Sydney Smith, who, as an investor in Pennsylvanian securities, said some hard things about the repudiation controversy in 1843, was stung by a retort that his letters showed a morbid hatred of America.

'Hate America!' he replied, 'I have loved and honoured America all my life; and in the "Edinburgh Review," and at all opportunities which my trumpery sphere of action has afforded, I have never ceased to praise and defend the United States.'

In a later generation, Thackeray 'felt almost as much at home in Broadway as on the Brompton pavement'; and, on the occasion of his second American lecturing tour, was 'no longer starting for a new world but returning to friends and to familiar associations.' 'The Virginians (1857-9) was a sequel to this visit and to the Four Georges,' who made their first appearance on American platforms. It is difficult to realise what the most devout American critics found to resent in the book; but one of Thackeray's American friends wrote to him, in June 1858 I've been fighting for you in papers, etc., for of course you know how you've been abused by us for "The Virginians," and especially the Washington.' The date

shows that the abuse must have related to the earlier chapters of the novel, which was issued in parts; but we had hitherto believed that George Warrington himself was the only person who disliked the Colonel Washington of the Castlewood days. Even the most perfervid American must have been satisfied with the later passage in which Thackeray, putting his own thoughts into the mouth of a soldier who had fought for King George against the Americans, speaks of the American leader as 'a character to admire and revere, a life without a stain, a fame without a flaw.'

Thackeray naturally leads us to the historians, whose honourable society may claim 'The Virginians' as well as 'The Four Georges'; and, indeed, it is scarcely necessary to enlarge upon the affection for America and the Americans cherished by men of letters of the last generation. One sentence may suffice. Since their noble closing of their Civil War, I have looked to them [the Americans] as the hope of our civilisation' (Meredith, 'Letters,' ii, 388). The words have acquired a new significance to-day.

Mr Altschul's survey of the kind of information about the War of Independence which is taught to children in American schools-a most useful investigation which may have far-reaching results-gives fresh point to the question: How have British historians treated the controversy? It must, of course, be admitted that the standpoints of historians in this country and in America are necessarily different. Bannockburn is an incident in the history of England, but it is much more than an incident in the history of Scotland; and the year 1776, or the year 1783, must always have a larger place in an American than in a British book. Varying estimates of the relative importance of events cannot but nourish differences in the emotions with which those events are regarded; and Dr Johnson himself would agree that a citizen of the United States 'is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force' by relating the story of his country's freedom. We should therefore expect to find our own accounts of the great quarrel more impartial than those written in America; and, on the whole, the expectation will not be disappointed, though it should be added that, in recent times, American

historians have rivalled our own writers both in the determination to be just and in the desire to be generous.

It would not help our investigation to examine such works as John Andrews' History of the War with America, France, Spain, and Holland' (1785–6), published immediately after the cessation of hostilities, or the careful, and, in some respects, still authoritative History of the American War' (1794), by Charles Stedman, an American Loyalist who had been an officer in Howe's army. The first general historian to treat the subject was John Adolphus. He was born in 1768, and was therefore fifteen years old at the time of the Peace of Versailles; and he published in 1802 three volumes on the 'History of England from 1760 to 1783.' Adolphus lived too near the events to avoid all traces of bitter feeling, but his general attitude is expressed in one of his early remarks about the opposition to the Stamp Act:

'The inhabitants of great part of North America were strongly imbued with the spirit of liberty which characterises the natives of Britain, from whom they derived their origin, and with that jealous irritability which is the companion and best guard of uncontaminated freedom.'

Adolphus' sympathies were modified by his insistence on the strictly legal position and by his dependence on Stedman's book. He himself shared the opinion of Josiah Tucker that, as the expense of the contest would more than countervail all the advantages to be derived from an enforced and sullen submission,' it would have been best to grant independence at once; and he described Tucker's advice as no less wise than noble,' but 'utterly impracticable in a deliberative government.' He resented the execution of André and other incidents in the war; but the American reader may be satisfied with the words in which an Englishman, writing in 1802, spoke of General Washington:

'Perhaps no personal character ever stood on a more elevated point of view than that of Washington at this period [1783]. The triumph of the American cause was justly attributed to his perseverance, prudence, and judgment; and his self-denial formed a noble and dignified example, rarely paralleled.'

Lord Stanhope's 'History of England from the Peace of Utrecht' (1836-63), written from a Whig standpoint, definitely adopted the American cause:

'Happy (he says) had it been for England if the views of her Ministers at that period had expanded with her territory, and led them to treat their distant settlers not as lonely dependants, but rather as fellow-subjects and as freemen! Happy had they refrained from measures of aggression which -rashly urged in council, but feebly supported in war-have converted many once loyal and contented provinces into a rival empire!'

Macaulay, in reviewing Southey's Colloquies,' took the opportunity of remarking that Southey

never speaks of the people of the United States with that pitiful affectation of contempt by which some members of his party have done more than wars or tariffs can do to excite mutual enmity between two communities formed for mutual friendship.'

Sir George Trevelyan, in his 'Early History of Charles James Fox' (1880) and in more recent works, has been more American than most recent Americans in his denunciation of the policy of the British Government. The Early History of Charles James Fox' appeared before the volumes of Mr Lecky's History of England in the 18th Century' (1878-1890) which treated of the American War; and, though Mr Lecky's object was to present what he regarded as a more balanced view than that of Sir George Trevelyan, his sympathy with essential points in the American contention was clearly expressed. Most important of all for the formation of general opinion were Macaulay's Essays' and J. R. Green's 'Short History,' for these books have, more than any others, influenced the writers of historical text-books, and, through them, successive generations of school children and young students. It is largely owing to the influence of Macaulay that we can say that, for at least fifty years, we have taught in our schools that the disasters of the years 1776-1783 were the deserved and inevitable results of an unwise policy; and that, whatever may be said from a purely legal or technical standpoint, our cause, in our quarrel with the Americans, was,