of this latest witness on the facts he could not measure the extent of the English feeling in our favor throughout the war. He could hardly know, without the help of this admirable work, unless he himself went to its sources, how fully that English feeling was the sense that the American Revolution was an English Revolution, and a continuation of the repeated resistance to kingly assumptions which ended only with our success.
The lesson of all truly written history seems to be the underlying unity of human affairs. By its light the wars fought in supposedly national interests are seen to have been fought from political or personal ambitions, and to have kept asunder the peoples whose natural relations would have been friendly. Certain wars, called good, for want of an epithet of closer fit, seem to have been inevitably fought, and these were overruled against the evil inherent in all wars, for the advantage of mankind. The American Revolution, given an English King like George III., was inevitable, for he was himself part of the fatality, but it is almost first among good wars in the results it had for the losers. The English people benefited by the defeat of the King equally with the American people, for with both the cause of English freedom triumphed. We think it had remained for the present historian of our Revolution to make us realize the fact in its full import; and that is why we believe that his book, coming in an era when there is nothing but the fading memories of past grievances to keep Americans and Englishmen unfriendly, will do very much more than the intermarriage of American millions and English titles to bind the two nations in lasting amity, in mutual intelligence.
We Americans are not at all a sentimental people, but we are, in spite of many administrational and financial displays to the contrary, rather passionately conscientious. We do like to think we are right. It is an immense personal satisfaction; what is best and finest in us is very much bound up with our belief that our birth as a nation was without stain; that we are still consecrated by its purity to high uses in the world. If an alien, and, above all, an Englishman, will come offering us the assurance of his own belief in our creed, how shall we do other than meet him more than half-way, and welcome him as the herald of good-will from all his kind?
It is the uncommon fortune of Sir George Trevelyan to write delightfully as well as convincingly in his story of our Revolution. Even where he convinces us least he does not delight us least, for nothing could be more charming than his study of the colonial conditions from which our national conditions rose. As we read the passages which portray the life of the New England farmer at the time he began to come under the observation of the European visitor, especially the philosophical visitor of French race and prepossessions, we held our breath a little in fear that the picture, frankly shown us at second hand, might be a vignette from some pretty eighteenth-century moral tale. We sighed for the difference which the traveller would find in the same region at our later day, but our courage returned with the perception that the historian's good-will did not carry him beyond a reasonable inference of our colonial virtues and advantages from the vignette. When it came to the study of specific character, of characteristics, the doubt which we seemed to incur was altogether past. The man of the Revolutionary period might have been too fondly seen as a type, but the men of that time were discerned with an eye whose report of them gave us the sense of ourselves seeing them for the first time, of seeing them alive. There is no affectation or pretence of discovery in our author's method. His Washington, Franklin, Adams, Arnold, Montgomery, Putnam, Lee, are in outline the men we have always known, and yet somehow we have not known them in such actuality before, in such measure of the modernity which resides in the important persons of every time. Where they were provisional, and destined to be outdated by events and conditions, they are as truly shown as where they were permanently great, and destined to outdate events and conditions. Putnam is an instance of the excellence of this portraiture in one kind, and Franklin as well as Adams in another; the analysis of the heroic elements in Arnold and the foreshadowing
