of their own people, naturally the same ruling class, sending out its own members or dependents to America, obtained the most grotesquely distorted notions of what Americans were and what they wanted or resented.  “Their office,” wrote Franklin of the Governors,[13] “makes them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being conscious that they are hated, they become malicious.  Their malice urges them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to Administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to encourage the use of severity) as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly.  Government believes all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance its officers,” etc.  The same spirit pervades the official correspondence of even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were at all times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension which needed only skilful fomentation by her English rulers to ruin all hopes of reconciliation and unity.  That phase was to come after the first Irish victories.  For the present the system—­for it can scarcely be called a policy—­was to irritate all Irishmen and all Americans alike, irrespective of creed, class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each side of the Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people.

The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. Holland in his “Imperium et Libertas,” is the confusion of political ideas in regard to the status of white dependencies—­a confusion greatly augmented by loose and misleading analogies with India and the tropical Colonies.  Even a genius like Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled.  Chatham came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw him back on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong.  It was not fully understood that there must be a radical difference between the government of places settled and populated by white colonists and of places merely exploited by white traders.  All the prerogatives of the Crown and Parliament were theoretically valid over both classes of dependency, and to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy.  Honest and fair-minded politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local freedom with Imperial unity.  We have the key now, though we have made no use of it in Ireland; but most of our forefathers not only had no glimmering of the truth when the fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war itself, and remained unenlightened for sixty years more.  If the renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite certain that friction would have subsequently arisen on other points.  The idea of what we now know as “responsible government” was unknown.  Short of coercive war, there seemed to be only two altogether logical