When once we were reconciled to a defeat which proved good for us, it became a tradition among English writers to venerate the American Revolution.  Later English historians have revolted from this indiscriminate veneration.  They insist on another side of the facts:  on the hopelessness of the American cause but for the commanding genius of Washington and his moral authority, and for the command which France and Spain obtained of the seas; on the petty quarrelsomeness with which the rights of the Colonists were urged, and the meanly skilful agitation which forced on the final rupture; on the lack of sustained patriotic effort during the war; on the base cruelty and dishonesty with which the loyal minority were persecuted and the private rights guaranteed by the peace ignored.  It does not concern us to ascertain the precise justice in this displeasing picture; no man now regrets the main result of the Revolution, and we know that a new country is a new country, and that there was much in the circumstances of the war to encourage indiscipline and ferocity.  But the fact that there is cause for such an indictment bears in two ways upon our present subject.

In the first place, there has been a tendency both in England and in America to look at this history upside down.  The epoch of the Revolution and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age—­wherein lived the elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest—­to be followed by almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline.  A more pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth.  The faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many influences that favoured decay.  The nobility of the Revolution in the eighteenth century may be rated higher or lower, but in the Civil War, in which the elder brothers of so many men now living bore their part, the people of the North and of the South alike displayed far more heroic qualities.

In the second place, the War of Independence and of the Revolution lacked some of the characteristics of other national uprisings.  It was not a revolt against grievous oppression or against a wholly foreign domination, but against a political system which the people mildly resented and which only statesmen felt to be pernicious and found to be past cure.  The cause appealed to far-seeing political aspiration and appealed also to turbulent and ambitious spirits and to whatever was present of a merely revolutionary temper, but the ordinary law-abiding man who minded his own business was not greatly moved one way or the other in his heart.

The subsequent movement which, in a few years after independence was secured, gave the United States a national and a working Constitution was altogether the work of a few, to which popular movement contributed nothing.  Of popular aspiration for unity there was none.  Statesmen knew that the new nation or group of nations lay helpless between pressing dangers from abroad and its own financial difficulties.  They saw clearly that they must create a Government of the Union which could exercise directly upon the individual American citizen an authority like that of the Government of his own State.  They did this, but with a reluctant and half-convinced public opinion behind them.