staunchest supporters failed.  The Revolution, like all revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human nature.  Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establishment of good laws.  As I have already indicated, the dislike and the systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension.  However true that may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar conditions.  Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has, at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa, and Ireland.  Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material for an indictment on the ground of bad character.  The Americans of the revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking, vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify, and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition in the case of Ireland.  Mr. J.W.  Fortescue, the learned and entertaining historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it can be done.  He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts—­men of his own national stock—­as the pestilent offspring of an “irreconcilable faction,” which had originally left England deeply imbued with the doctrines of Republicanism.  Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of meanness and turpitude.  They struggled for no high principle, and refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the maintenance of the Imperial Army.  It is always the “mob,” the “ruffians,” the “rabble,” of Boston who carry out the reprisals against the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of unscrupulous “agitators.”  It has been, and remains, an obsession with the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an artificial