The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [127]
Suddenly North too seemed to vacillate. Pushed by Dartmouth, who was still trying for a peaceful settlement, he presented his own Conciliatory Proposition, which offered to exempt from taxation any individual colony that raised its own revenue for administration and defense in amounts that the King and Parliament approved. “Uncertainty, surprise, and distraction were seated on every countenance” until it became apparent that the plan was designed to divide the colonies against each other and that, since it offered no repeal of the Coercive Acts, it would not be accepted anyway.
Burke prolonged the last chance in a major effort and another enormous outpouring—for he never spoke in less than a torrent. His main point was “the absolute necessity of keeping up a concord of this empire by a unity of spirit.” This could only be managed, he said, by possessing the sovereignty but not exercising it. Whether they liked it or not, the American spirit of liberty existed; their forebears emigrated because of it, and it remained stronger in the English colonists than probably in any other people on earth. “It cannot be removed, it cannot be suppressed, therefore the only way that remains is to comply with it, or if you please, to submit to it as a necessary evil.” Here he reached the great prescription: “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.” Let the Coercive Acts be repealed, let the Americans tax themselves “by grant and not by imposition.” Allow them freedom and opportunity to grow rich and they will supply all the more resources against France and Spain.
Large minds are needed for magnanimity. George III and his ministers and their majority in Parliament, heedless of reason and their ultimate interest, proceeded on their course toward suppression. It was plain that even if they should win, which experienced soldiers like Amherst and Howe thought doubtful, they would lose through the enmity created. This was not a hidden perception. “It is that kind of war in which even victory will ruin us,” wrote Walpole at this hour to his friend Horace Mann. Why were King and Cabinet blind to that outcome? Because they could think no further ahead than affirming supremacy and assumed without thinking about it that military victory over the “rabble” was a matter of course. They never doubted that Americans must succumb to British arms. This was the governing factor. A Colonel Grant, who said he had served in America and knew the Americans well, assured the House of Commons that “they would not fight. They would never dare to face an English army and did not possess any of the qualifications necessary to make a good soldier.” The House of Lords heard the same kind of thing. Lord Sandwich, replying to an opposition member who warned that the colonies would draw on unlimited numbers, said fatuously, “What does that signify? They are raw undisciplined cowardly men,” and the more the better because “if they did not run away, they would starve themselves into compliance with our measures.” He and his colleagues were glad to have the interminable quarrel with the colonies finally settled by force, which to those who feel themselves stronger always seems the easiest solution.
Further, they continued to believe, as Lord Gower put it, that the rebellious language of the Americans “was the language of the rabble and a few factional leaders,” and that the delegates to the Continental Congress, “far from expressing the true sense of the respectable part of their constituents,” had been chosen “by a kind of force in which people of consequence were afraid to interpose.” While there may have been a certain validity to his idea about the people of consequence, it