agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots—­a view which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the argument for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for liberty; and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of self-contradiction and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible account of a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was “factitious,” initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he contends, was “the work of a small but energetic and well-organized minority towards which the mass of the people, when not directly hostile, was mainly indifferent.”  Happily, Mr. Fortescue’s candour as an historian of facts gives us the clue to this strange tangle.  We find no evidence that the sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, and whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with ease in co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in fact, a majority, nor that they were either better or worse men, or more or less ardent patriots, than the mutinous minority, or the British regular soldiers themselves.  Their loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is sometimes interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious; they are given to desertion, like Washington’s troops, like Lee’s and Grant’s troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops and like all Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine war with the duty of keeping their homes and business afloat.  We find, too, that a counter-current of desertion flows from the British, and still more from the German, regulars, also a natural enough phenomenon in what was virtually a civil war for liberty; so that “General Greene was often heard to say that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with British soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of America.”  And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case, exultingly quotes against the Americans “the cynical Benedict Arnold, who knew his countrymen,” and who said:  “Money will go farther than arms in America.”  Yet Arnold, whose opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue accepts as correct and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter, but a perjured military traitor of the most despicable kind.  We may conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole Revolution, that Washington not only knew his countrymen, who were Mr. Fortescue’s countrymen, better than Arnold, but was a better representative of their dominant characteristics.[15]