should have a commission to execute martial law.3

Such arguments, used though they were to meet a particular and transient object, illustrate nevertheless the persistent appeal to their English inheritance made by the colonists before and long after the Revolution. The intensely conservative nature of that appeal is illustrated by the latest argument for the constitutional character of the colonists' claims. "The Crown was not involved." Their quarrel was with a Revolution. One of the first Acts of the first Republican government of England in 1649 declared England and all its dominions a Commonwealth and Free State to be governed by Parliament "without any king or House of Lords." The doctrine of John Adams and Prof. McIlwain is the royalist doctrine of Charles I; and the trouble of the conservative colonists was with a revolutionary principle, asserted alike by the English Commonwealth in 1649, by the French Republic in 1793, and by the United

4

Essay Of Plantations.

'McIlwain, op. cit. p. 22, "this novel declaration, this tremendous innovation, includes all that the Americans protested against from 1765 to 1776." So John Dickinson wrote in 1774: "A dependence on the crown and parliament of Great Britain is a novelty-a dreadful novelty" (ibid. p. 23 n.); and Prof. McIlwain contends, soundly enough from the strictly constitutional point of view, that the Long Parliament had since 1642 "exercised powers that were wholly unprecedented and entirely illegal" (ibid. p. 25). The doctrine against which the colonists contended, was enunciated in 1643 by Prynne in his Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdoms.

States in 1861, that it was one and indivisible. So, too, down to the Civil War it was argued that slavery had been part of the common law of England and of the birthright of the colonists."

This continuity, in spite of the breach in 1776, helps to explain the conservatism which has been one of the principal factors in American history. It has continually surprised Englishmen who assumed that, because the colonists determined to govern themselves in their own way, and made what is called a revolution in order to get it, that way was necessarily the road to political instability if not to social disruption. The Revolution was regarded as a sort of original sin which permanently stamped on Americans the characteristics of a revolutionary people. He could not forget, wrote Lord Malmesbury in 1803, that they were revolted subjects. But Macaulay's pessimistic prognostication that America's "purely democratic institutions" would "sooner or later destroy liberty or civilisation, or both," because "the American Constitution is all sail and no anchor" is one of the most infelicitous prophecies any historian ever made; and English historians,

7

Judah P. Benjamin in Powell, Nullification, pp. 380-5. For Benjamin's singular career see Dict. Nat. Biogr. He was debarred from holding office after the Civil War and retired to England, where, says Prof. Dicey, his "career as a lawyer excited great and just admiration. . I know it was reported that there was some idea of placing him on the Bench" (J. F. Rhodes, Hist. U.S.A. v. 480-1, 608).

6

Diaries and Correspondence, ed. 1844, IV. 203.

'J. M. Beck, American Constitution, p. 150.

it must be confessed, have not been happy in their American forecasts. In 1863 Freeman published a "History of Federal Government from the Foundation of the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States, vol. I." No more volumes appeared. It was Freeman's history and not the United States that suffered disruption; and when in 1893 a new edition appeared, it came out with the more accurate but less prophetic title of a "History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy." 8

Macaulay's prophecy was based on a complete misapprehension of the American character and Constitution. It also betrayed a misjudgment of human nature. It assumed that men are by nature radical or revolutionary, that the only circumstance that prevents them from changing is lack of power to change, and that therefore the American people, having secured a popular form of government, would always be changing-on the theory that man never knows what he wants but will never be happy till he gets it. We might argue on the other hand that it requires a good deal of education to make a man into a radical, and a good deal of poverty, hardship, and oppression to turn him into a revolutionary. Three centuries ago Sully, the great min

The reference to the disruption of the United States is omitted from the title as given in the Dict. Nat. Biogr. and in Dean Stephens' Life and Letters of Freeman (see Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 11. 28 a). For Freeman's recantation see his Impressions of the United States 1883, pp. 281-3. Carlyle was little more fortunate than Freeman or Macauley (see Froude, Carlyle's Life in London, 11, 266).

ister of Henry IV of France, had noted that men do not rebel out of eagerness to attack but from impatience of suffering; and Burke had concurred in the judgment."

American prosperity has been sufficiently obvious, tested by European standards, yet American conservatism continued to be a cause of surprise; and an eminent English publicist began a London letter to the New York Nation in 1880 by quoting a recently published remark that "an English radical is much struck with the conservatism of the American people," and by agreeing that the observation "represents the impression which the United States must have made upon hundreds of English visitors." 10 His general explanation was that "experience no less than theory proves that it is with people as with children: what they are allowed to do they often do not care to do at all; and a democracy with uncontrolled power to change everything, is constantly found indisposed to alter anything. In other words, the Americans, having secured what they wanted in their own independence and a Constitution of their own making, naturally became conservative and content. The fact that, after the original Constitution and twelve more or less consequential Amendments had been adopted by 1804, not a syllable in its text

'Mémoires, ed. 1882, 1. 227; Burke, Select Works, ed. Payne, 1. 7. 10 Prof. A. V. Dicey in New York Nation, March, 1880, reprinted in Pollak, Fifty Years of Idealism, p. 309.

was changed for sixty years, during which European countries passed from one revolution to another and even England was brought to the verge of it in 1832, is sufficient evidence of the constitutional conservatism of the United States, although the fact that some 1700 amendments were proposed argues no lack of individual inventiveness.

Contentment is, however, an incomplete explanation of this constitutional conservatism. Another and probably a more fundamental cause is to be found in the boundless opportunities for self-ex-p pression which the American people found in other fields than politics. Conservatism dominated there because inventive energy, ambition, discontent, and sometimes first class brains, became engrossed in business and in pioneering, and left politics to a vicarious and a professional class. Instead of lining barricades, the dissatisfied American took to clearing forests; a people has little temptation to revolt where it can get land, the common basis of all conservatism, almost for the asking; and, by giving the land to those who asked, the American government broadened the basis, if it did not lay the foundations, of American individualism. John Quincy Adams might unconsciously have made the Union socialist. "My own system of administration," he confessed,11 "which was to make the na

"Memoirs, IX. 257-8, quoted in F. J. Turner, The Frontier, p.