This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic appreciation of the crisis.  The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mother country as well.  Burke had a vehement correspondent who wrote to him (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to be the consequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, then he would be the first to say, Let her perish! If England prevails, said Horace Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end; if one fell, the other would fall with it.  Burke, seeing this, “certainly never could and never did wish,” as he says of himself, “the colonists to be subdued by arms.  He was fully persuaded that if such should be the event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great body of standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces.  He was strongly of opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself."[1] The way for this remote peril was being sedulously prepared by a widespread deterioration among popular ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they had previously gained in the public mind.  In order to prove that the Americans had no right to their liberties, we were every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.  To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself.  The material strength of the Government, and its moral strength alike, would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists, to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even jeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too.  As events actually fell out, the ferocious administration of the law in the last five or six years of the eighteenth century was the retribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of the English community had watched the measures of the Government against their fellow-Englishmen in America.

[Footnote 1:  Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.]

It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through the successive stages of parliamentary action in the American war.  He always defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was repealed, and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother country was preserved in a Declaratory Act.  When the project of taxing the colonies was revived, and relations with them were becoming strained and dangerous, Burke came forward with a plan for leaving the General Assemblies of the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead of giving and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid in the colonies.  Needless to say that it was rejected, and perhaps it was not feasible.  Henceforth Burke could only watch in impotence the blunders of Government, and the disasters that befell the national arms.  But his protests against the war will last as long as our literature.