ments just as if no Stamp Act existed. Thomas Hutchinson, and most men of wealth and position in the colony, preferred to resist the Stamp Act in the legal way, and they therefore adjourned the courts of law from time to time. This method appealed to conservative men, whose incomes were assured, who were not much affected by a temporary cessation of business, and who wished not to compromise their position by any action that could be called illegal. But rising young lawyers like John Adams found that if the courts closed their fees were cut off and their position at once became precarious. The closing of the courts, John Adams wrote in his Diary, “will make a great chasm in my affairs, if it does not reduce me to distress." And in another place he says that he was just at the point of winning a competence and a reputation "when this execrable Stamp Act came for my ruin and that of my country."

This naïve statement reveals one of the reasons-not the only reason, but one of the reasons why John Adams, and all those who depended on fees and wages for a living, those whose interest it was to have business in a flourishing condition, were in favor of the more radical method, the illegal method, of resisting the Stamp Act, while men of wealth who lived on their incomes could afford to

adopt the more cautious and conservative method. And thus it happened that John Adams came to think Thomas Hutchinson as much an enemy of colonial rights as Mr. Grenville. He convinced himself that Mr. Hutchinson and his wealthy friends, while professing to oppose the Stamp Act, were really tools of the British government and were trying in this indirect way to force the people to submit to the Stamp Act. He reasoned that the Boston aristocracy was able to maintain its privileged position in Massachusetts only because it was backed by the British government; and thus the struggle against parliamentary taxation came to be identified with the struggle against a privileged class in the colony.

It is this aspect of the Revolution that gives it its chief significance for modern democracy. The privileged classes in the Colonies, generally speaking, never really desired separation from Great Britain. They took old England as their ideal. Outside of New England most educated men were educated in England, and wished for nothing better than to fashion their clothes, their houses, their minds, and their manners on the best English models. They opposed parliamentary taxation because they wanted to manage their own affairs in miniature parliaments, where they

could carry on miniature contests with the governors for the control of the purse, after the manner of the English Parliament in the seventeenth century. In no sense were they democrats; and they were as much afraid of radical movements in the Colonies as they were of British oppression. They wanted to preserve their liberties against Parliament, without sharing their privileges with the people in the Colonies. They wanted home rule, but they wanted to rule at home. Left to themselves, the governing classes in America would never have carried the contest to the point of rebellion, would never have created an independent state.

The opposition to this ideal gradually transformed the Revolution into a social as well as a political movement. Men of true democratic feeling came to see that the mere maintenance of what were called English liberties would leave things much as they were, even if the Colonies should separate from Great Britain. They wanted not simply an independent state, but a new kind of state. They were aiming at something more than could be justified by an appeal to the customary rights of Englishmen. Whether the customary rights of Englishmen supported the contention of the Colonies or the contentions of the king depended upon fine points

in law and history. But it was a question that could be ably argued on both sides. In any case, there was nothing in the customary rights of Englishmen that could be used in support of equal rights for all, poor and rich alike. And so, step by step, the radical leaders broadened out their political theory, and came finally to rest their cause not merely on the positive and prescriptive rights of Englishmen, but upon the natural and universal rights of man as well.

As the Revolution ceased to be a mere contest for the rights of Englishmen and took on the character of a contest for the rights of man, it acquired an idealistic and semimystical quality and gathered to itself, as all such movements do, the emotional force of a religious conviction. Mr. Lecky says that the American Revolution was essentially sordid, being concerned fundamentally with a mere money dispute. There was much that was sordid in the motives and the actions of many men who took part in the Revolutionary War, but nothing could be more profoundly wrong than to regard the principal leaders as inspired by no higher motive than that of safeguarding their property. The conflict with Great Britain began as a money dispute; but in the end it came to be transfigured, in the minds of the American patriots, into one of the

great epic conflicts of the world. We have ourselves lived through such a transfiguration. The Great War began as a conflict for land and trade, but it speedily took on, in the minds of the people concerned, the aspect of a titanic struggle between the powers of light and of darkness, a struggle which men fondly, if vainly, hoped would bring in a new international order based upon the principles of justice and humanity. So it was with the American Revolution. American patriots came to think of themselves as hazarding their lives and their fortunes for the sake of a new social order, the ideal society founded upon the enduring principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

There is a striking similarity between the ideals and the language of the American patriots and the radical leaders of the French Revolution. They speak with the same lyrical enthusiasm, like men who are defending and propagating a new religion. "It is impossible," writes Richard Henry Lee, "that vice can so triumph over virtue as that the slaves of Tyranny should succeed against the brave and generous asserters of Liberty and the just rights of humanity." Consider the dry common sense with which Doctor Johnson disposed of the alleged tyranny of Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, op