formed into a revolution a political movement which began with the avowed purpose of confining itself to a struggle for redress of grievances, and within the limits of constitutional opposition. If, for example, we consider the point with reference to cultivation. and moral refinement, it may seem to us a significant fact that among the members of the Loyalist party are to be found the names of a great multitude of the graduates of our colonial colleges especially of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and Pennsylvania. Thus, in an act of banishment passed by Massachusetts, in September, 1778, against the most prominent of the Tory leaders in that State, one may now read the names of three hundred and ten of her citizens. And who were they? Let us go over their names. Are these the names of profligates, and desperadoes, or even of men of slight and equivocal consideration? To any one at all familiar with the history of colonial New England, that list of men, denounced to exile and loss of property on account of their opinions, will read almost like the beadroll of the oldest and noblest families concerned in the founding and upbuilding of New England civilization. Moreover, of that catalogue of three hundred and ten men of Massachusetts, banished for an offence to which the most of them appear to have been driven by conscientious convictions, more than sixty1 were graduates of Harvard. This fact is probably a typical one; and of the whole body of the Loyalists throughout the thirteen colonies, it must be said that it contained, as one of its ablest antagonists long after admitted, "more than a third of influential characters," - that is, a very considerable portion of the customary chiefs and representatives of conservatism in each community.

By any standard of judgment, therefore, according to which we usually determine the personal quality of any party of men and women in this world whether the standard be intellectual or moral, or social, or merely conventional - the Tories of the Revolution seem to have been not a profligate party, nor an unprincipled one, nor a reckless or even a light-minded one, but, on the contrary, to have had among them a very considerable portion of the most refined, thoughtful, and conscientious people in the colonies. So true is this, that in 1807 a noble-minded Scottish woman, Mistress Anne Grant of Laggan, who in her early life had been familiar with American colonial society, compared the loss which America suffered in consequence of the expatriation of the Loyalists by the Revolution, to the loss which France suffered in consequence

1 George E. Ellis, in Narr. and Crit. Hist. Am., VII. 195.

of the expatriation of so many of her Protestants by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.1

So much, then, must be said on behalf of the Tories of the Revolution,-in point of numbers, they were far from inconsiderable, and in point of character, they were far from despicable. On the one hand, they formed no mere rump party. If they were not actually a majority of the American people, as they themselves always claimed to be, and as some careful scholars now think they were, -they did at least constitute a huge minority of the American people: they formed a section of colonial society too important on the score of mere numbers to be set down as a paltry handful of obstructives; while in any rightful estimate of personal value, quite aside from mere numbers, they seem to deserve the consideration which conscientious and cultivated people of one party never ask in vain of conscientious and cultivated people of the opposite party, -at least after the issues of the controversy are closed.

V

Pressing forward, then, with our investigation, we proceed to apply to the American Loyalists that test by which we must judge any party of men who have taken one side, and have borne an important share in any great historical controversy. This is the test of argumentative value. It asks whether the logical position of the party was or was not a strong one.

Even yet it is not quite needless to remind ourselves that the American Revolution was a war of argument long before it became a war of physical force; and that, in this war of argument, were involved a multitude of difficult questions, constitutional, legal, political, ethical, -with respect to which honest and thoughtful people were compelled to differ. All these questions, however, may, for our purposes, be reduced to just two: first, the question of what was lawful under the existing constitution of the British empire; and secondly, the question of what was expedient under the existing circumstances of the colonies. Now, paradoxical as it may seem to many of the American descendants of the victorious party, each of those questions had two very real and quite opposite sides; much was to be said for each side; and for the Tory side so much was to be said in the way of solid fact and of valid reasoning, that an intelligent and a noble-minded American might have taken that side, and might have stuck to it, and might have gone into battle for it, and might have imperilled all the interests of his

1 Mrs. Anne Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, etc., 353.

life in defence of it, without any just impeachment of his reason or of his integrity without deserving to be called, then or since then, either a weak man or a bad one.

That we may develop before our eyes something of the argumentative strength of the Loyalist position, in the appeal which it actually made to honest men at that time, let us take up for a moment the first of the two questions to which, as has just been. said, the whole dispute may be reduced, the question of what was lawful under the existing constitution of the British Empire. Let us strike into the very heart of that question. It was the contention of the American Whigs that the British Parliament could not lawfully tax us, because by so doing it would be violating an ancient maxim of the British constitution: "No taxation. without representation." Have we not all been taught from our childhood that the citation of that old maxim simply settled the constitutional merits of the whole controversy, and settled it absolutely in favor of the Whigs? But did it so settle it? Have we not been accustomed to think that the refusal of the American Tories to give way before the citation of that maxim was merely a case of criminal stupidity or of criminal perversity on their part? But was it so?

On the contrary, many of the profoundest constitutional lawyers in America, as well as in England, both rejected the foregoing Whig contention, and at the same time admitted the soundness and the force of the venerable maxim upon which that contention was alleged to rest. Thus the leading English jurists, who supported the parliamentary taxation of the colonies, did not dispute that maxim. Even George Grenville, the author and champion of the Stamp Act, did not dispute it. "The colonies claim, it is true," said he, "the privilege which is common to all British subjects, of being taxed only with their own consent, given by their representatives. And may they ever enjoy the privilege in all its extent; may this sacred pledge of liberty be preserved inviolate to the utmost verge of our dominions, and to the latest pages of our history! I would never lend my hand. toward forging chains for America, lest, in so doing, I should forge them for myself. But the remonstrances of the Americans fail in the great point of the colonies not being represented in Parliament, which is the common council of the whole empire, and as such is as capable of imposing internal taxes as impost. duties, or taxes on intercolonial trade, or laws of navigation."1

1 Given in George Bancroft, History of the United States, last revision, III. 98. These sentences of Grenville, which are not to be found in Hansard, seem to have been C

These words of Grenville may help us to understand the position of the American Loyalists. They frankly admitted the maxim of "No taxation without representation"; but the most of them denied that the maxim was violated by the acts of Parliament laying taxation upon the colonies. Here everything depends, they argued, on the meaning to be attached to the word "representation"; and that meaning is to be ascertained by ascertaining what was understood by the word in England at the time when this old maxim originated, and in the subsequent ages during which it had been quoted and applied. Now, the meaning then attached to the word in actual constitutional experience in England is one which shows that the commons of America, like the commons of England, are alike represented in that great branch of the British Parliament which proclaims its representative character in its very name, the House of Commons. During the whole period in which the maxim under consideration had been acquiring authority, the idea was that representation in Parliament was constituted, not by the fact of a man's having a vote for a member of Parliament, but by the fact of his belonging to one of the three great divisions of the nation which were represented by the three orders of Parliament, - that is, royalty, nobility, commonalty. Thus if you are a member of the royal family, the monarch is your representative, when he acts in his capacity as the highest of the three orders of Parliament, and this though you never voted for him, as of course you never did. Again, if you are a member of the nobility, and yourself without a seat in the House of Lords, you are represented in Parliament by the members of that house, even though you never voted for any of them. So, too, if you are of the commonalty, you are represented in Parliament by the men composing the House of Commons, even though you may never have had a vote for any of its members. In short, the old English idea of representation was, that the three great orders of the British Parliament - king, lords, and commons-represented severally the three great classes of the British people, to which their names correspond, — royalty, nobility, and commonalty, and that they did so by virtue of the fact that each order might justly be supposed to be identified with the interests and to be familiar with the needs and the demands of its own class. Therefore, the historic meaning of the word "representation," as it was used in English constitutional expe

compiled by Bancroft from several contemporary reports to be met with in private letters from persons who heard Grenville. Compare 18th ed. of Bancroft, V. 237,

note.

rience, is a meaning which shows that the commons of America, as an integral part of the commons of the British Empire, are to all intents and purposes represented in that great branch of the British Parliament which, by its very name, announces itself as standing in a representative character towards the entire British commonalty.

It was no sufficient reply to this statement to say, as some did say, that such representation as has just been described was a very imperfect kind of representation. Of course it was an imperfect kind of representation; but, whatever it was, it was exactly the kind of representation that was meant by the old constitutional maxim thus cited; for it was the only kind of representation practised, or known, or perhaps ever conceived of in England during all those ages which had witnessed the birth and the growth of this old formula. The truth is that representation, as a political fact in this world, has thus far been a thing of degrees-a thing of less and of more; that perfect representation has even yet not been anywhere attained in this world; that in the last century representation in England was very much less perfect than it has since become; and, finally, that, in the period now dealt with, what had always been meant by the word "representation" in the British Empire was satisfied by such a composition of the House of Commons as that, while its members were voted for by very few even of the common people in England, yet, the moment that its members were elected, they became, in the eye of the constitution and in the spirit of this old formula, the actual representatives of all the commoners of the whole empire, in all its extent, in all its dominions and dependencies.

Accordingly, when certain English commoners in America at last rose up and put forward the claim that, merely because they had no votes for members of the House of Commons, therefore that House did not represent them, and therefore they could not lawfully be taxed by Parliament, it was very naturally said, in reply, that these English commoners in America were demanding for themselves a new and a peculiar definition of the word "representation"; a definition never up to that time given to it in England, and never of course up to that time claimed or enjoyed by English commoners in England. For, how was it at that time in England with respect to the electoral privilege? Indeed, very few people in England then had votes for members of the House of Commons,only one-tenth of the entire population of the realm. How about the other nine-tenths of the population of the realm? Had not those British subjects in England as good a right as these British