opposed to the American cause. These were the Loyalists-Americans who remained loyal to Great Britain. They were not only numerous, but they included many of the ablest and most influential men in the Colonies, being largely recruited from the upper classes -landowners, merchants, clergymen, and officials, who had hitherto constituted the governing class, and who opposed the Revolution quite as much because of their fear of democracy as on account of any strong attachment to Great Britain. This division within their own ranks greatly weakened the colonists and gave to the struggle something of the character of a civil war.

But besides this class division, which appeared in every colony, the chances of success were immensely lessened by the persistence and even the accentuation of the old rivalries between the different colonies. "There ought to be no New England man, no New-Yorker, known on the continent, but all of us Americans." So Christopher Gadsden wrote at the time of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. It was a noble ideal of which most men no doubt vaguely felt the force; but neither New England men nor New-Yorkers nor South-Carolinians could be wholly transformed overnight. It took a hundred years to effect this transformation; and the student

of the Revolution is sometimes amused, but more often amazed and disheartened, by the petty jealousies, the personal animosities, the hopeless provincialism, and the sordid corruption which everywhere prevailed and which but gave an added luster to the fame of those outstanding Americans, such as Washington and John Adams and Franklin, without whose services the Revolution must have completely failed.

Of these three illustrious leaders the name of Washington stands out as a symbol of all that is heroic and admirable in the annals of his country. He was a Virginia planter, accounted the wealthiest man in the Colonies, whose life had been chiefly given to managing, with the most scrupulous care and with the highest efficiency, the estate which lay on the south bank of the Potomac at Mount Vernon. Scarcely a politician, he was yet a man of broad vision, who foresaw a great future for his country and was actively interested in the development of the great west that lay beyond the Alleghanies. Such military experience as he possessed had been gained in the French and Indian War; and particularly in the famous Braddock Expedition he had revealed a knowledge of frontier Indian fighting which the British general did not possess and declined to take advantage of,

and in this disastrous retreat he had exhibited a courage and a resourcefulness which had won him the respect of the British and the confidence of his countrymen.

It was on June 17, 1775, that this Virginia colonel was appointed to be "General and Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the United Colonies." It was a high-sounding title for the leader of the nondescript collection of soldiers who fought the Revolutionary War; but no man who ever undertook a great task was better fitted for its manifold duties. For the exhibition of brilliant military genius there were during the eight years of war but few opportunities; but for patience and resolution, for sound, practical judgment, resourcefulness, for ability to make the most of an untoward situation or a hopeless defeat, for the spirit that could inspire soldiers and civilians with loyalty to a cause which always seemed irretrievably lost-for all these qualities the American War of Independence furnished a test which only a great soul could have met with success.

It was the merit of Washington that he possessed these qualities, each in perfection, and all in the happiest combination. He was the man of staid mind and impregnable character who gathered all the scattered and discordant forces of the Revolution and directed

them to the achievement of the great end, so modest that he thought himself incompetent to the task, yet of such heroic resolution that neither difficulties nor reverses nor betrayals could bring him to despair; a man of rectitude, whose will was steeled to finer temper by every defeat, and who was not to be turned, by any failure or success, by calumny, by gold, or by the dream of empire, from the straight path of his purpose. At the end of eight years of unremitting labor, which depleted his fortune and for which he asked no more than the payment of his personal expenses, that purpose was at last achieved.

No man was ever more rightly called the father of his country; but even the indomitable resolution of Washington, supported by the dogged persistence and garrulous common sense of John Adams and the suppleness and resource of Franklin's intelligence even these would not have sufficed to win independence. It was America's good fortune that in this decisive hour of her history France came to stand by her side. Without the aid of France, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence would have pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in vain, and would have been known to history as rebels against rightful authority instead of defenders of human liberty.

The influences that brought France to stand with America bear a curiously apt relation to these two characteristic phases of the Revolution that have been mentioned. No one could have had less sympathy with rebellious subjects proclaiming the doctrine of popular sovereignty than Louis XVI, the chief exemplar of autocracy in Europe; but no one could regard with greater satisfaction the disruption of the British Empire. For a hundred years England and France had struggled in peace and in war, on land and on the sea, for the possession of the New World as the basis of maritime and commercial supremacy. And England had won. In every stage England had won; and never so completely as in the last war. The Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France had been expelled from America and India, was the profoundest humiliation which France had suffered, and the memory of it still rankled.

Inevitably, therefore, as a matter of practical politics, the French government sought to redress the balance of power in Europe and the world by diminishing the power of Great Britain. The persistent promoter of this policy was the Foreign Minister, Vergennes, who watched with delight the growing dispute between the mother country and the American provinces, and who labored