England and Virginia the war must have more than once collapsed for want of men and supplies.  It is impossible to exaggerate the absence of public spirit in the States during this critical period of their history.  The English historian, Lecky, who has reviewed the annals of those times with great fairness, has truly said:  “The nobility and beauty of the character of Washington can hardly be surpassed; several of the other leaders of the revolution were men of ability and public spirit, and few armies have ever shown a nobler self-devotion than that which remained with Washington through the dreary winter at Valley Forge.  But the army that bore those sufferings was a very small one, and the general aspect of the American people during the contest was far from heroic or sublime.”  This opinion is fully borne out by those American historians who have reviewed the records of their national struggle in a spirit of dispassionate criticism.  We know that in the spring of 1780 Washington himself wrote that his troops were “constantly on the point of starving for want of provisions and forage.”  He saw “in every line of the army the most serious features of mutiny and sedition.”  Indeed he had “almost ceased to hope,” for he found the country in general “in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests” that he dare not flatter himself “with any change for the better.”  The war under such circumstances would have come to a sudden end had not France liberally responded to Washington’s appeals and supported him with her money, her sailors and her soldiers.  In the closing years of the war Great Britain had not only to fight France, Spain, Holland and her own colonies, but she was without a single ally in Europe.  Her dominion was threatened in India, and the king prevented the intervention of the only statesman in the kingdom to whom the colonists at any time were likely to listen with respect.  When Chatham died with a protest on his lips “against the dismemberment of this ancient monarchy,” the last hope of bringing about a reconciliation between the revolutionists and the parent state disappeared for ever, and the Thirteen Colonies became independent at Yorktown.

SECTION 2.—­Canada and Nova Scotia during the Revolution.

If Canada was saved to England during the American Revolution it was not on account of the energy and foresight shown by the king and his ministers in providing adequately for its defence, but mainly through the coolness and excellent judgment displayed by Governor Carleton.  The Quebec act, for which he was largely responsible, was extremely unpopular in the Thirteen Colonies, on account of its having extended the boundaries of the province and the civil law to that western country beyond the Alleghanies, which the frontiersmen of Pennsylvania and Virginia regarded as specially their own domain.  The fact that the Quebec act was passed by parliament simultaneously with the Boston port bill and other measures especially levelled against Massachusetts, gave additional fuel to the indignation of the people, who regarded this group of acts as part of a settled policy to crush the British-speaking colonies.