Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, and we know the source of that prepossession, a passionate love of the British Army, which does him great honour, while it distorts his political vision.  I should not refer at such length to his view of the American War were it not that, whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for discussion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predominant philosophy.  Historical sense seems to vanish, and the same savage racial bias supervenes, whether the unruly people concerned are absolutely consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality.  Instead of a general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want what by all the constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and the correspondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a conviction solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while making that very violence an argument for the depravity of those who use it, and a pretext for denying them self-government.

All this is terribly true in the case of Ireland, and when I next revert to the American continent, the reader will observe that the same ideas were entertained towards Canada, the only white Colony left to the British Empire after the loss of the thirteen States.

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable.  Nearly all historians have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees; but Mr. S.B.  Weeks, a Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that this was not the case ("Religious Development in the Province of North Carolina,” Baltimore, 1892).  The Charter contained a clause for liberty of conscience on the instructive ground that, “by reason of the remote distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and conformity established in this realm.”

[9] “Church and State in Maryland,” George Petrie.  Lord Baltimore, the Catholic founder and Proprietary, enforced complete tolerance from the first (1634), and secured the passage of an Act in 1649 giving legal force to the policy, with heavy penalties against interference with any sect.  In 1654 Puritans gained control of the Assembly, and passed an Act against Popery.  A counter-revolution repealed this Act, but finally in 1689 the Church of England was established by law.

[10] Lecky, “History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century,” vol. i., pp. 408-410.

[11] Until 1692 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, elected their own Governors.  Massachusetts continued to have Colonial Governors, and sometimes New Jersey and New Hampshire.  Proprietary Governments were gradually abolished and converted into “Royal” Governments like the rest.  At the period of the Declaration of Independence two only were left—­Pennsylvania and Maryland (see “Origin and Growth of the English Colonies,” H.E.  Egerton).