The War of Independence | Page 5

notice. In
climbing to our lonely vantage-ground, while the familiar scenes fade
from sight, there are gradually unfolded to us those connections
between crag and meadow and stream that make the life and meaning
of the whole. We learn the "lay of the land," and become, in a humble
way, geographers. So in the history of men and nations, while we
remain immersed in the study of personal incidents and details, as what
such a statesman said or how many men were killed in such a battle, we
may quite fail to understand what it was all about, and we shall be sure
often to misjudge men's characters and estimate wrongly the
importance of many events. For this reason we cannot clearly see the
meaning of the history of our own times. The facts are too near us; we
are down among them, like the man who could not see the forest
because there were so many trees. But when we look back over a long
interval of years, we can survey distant events and personages like
points in a vast landscape and begin to discern the meaning of it all. In
this way we come to see that history is full of lessons for us. Very few
things have happened in past ages with which our present welfare is not
in one way or another concerned. Few things have happened in any age
more interesting or more important than the American Revolution.

CHAPTER II.
THE COLONIES IN 1750.
It is always difficult in history to mark the beginning and end of a
period. Events keep rushing on and do not pause to be divided into
chapters; or, in other words, in the history which really takes place, a
new chapter is always beginning long before the old one is ended. The
divisions we make when we try to describe it are merely marks that we
make for our own convenience. In telling the story of the American
Revolution we must stop somewhere, and the inauguration of President
Washington is a very proper place. We must also begin somewhere, but
it is quite clear that it will not do to begin with the Declaration of
Independence in July, 1776, or even with the midnight ride of Paul
Revere in April, 1775. For if we ask what caused that "hurry of hoofs in
a village street," and what brought together those five-and-fifty
statesmen at Philadelphia, we are not simply led back to the Boston
Tea-Party, and still further to the Stamp Act, but we find it necessary to
refer to events that happened more than a century before the Revolution
can properly be said to have begun. Indeed, if we were going to take a
very wide view of the situation, and try to point out its relations to the
general history of mankind, we should have to go back many hundreds
of years and not only cross the ocean to the England of King Alfred,
but keep on still further to the ancient market-places of Rome and
Athens, and even to the pyramids of Egypt; and in all this long journey
through the ages we should not be merely gratifying an idle curiosity,
but at every step of the way could gather sound practical lessons, useful
in helping us to vote intelligently at the next election for mayor of the
city in which we live or for president of the United States.
[Sidenote: The half-way station in American History]
We are not now, however, about to start on any such long journey. It is
a much nearer and narrower view of the American Revolution that we
wish to get. There are many points from which we might start, but we
must at any rate choose a point several years earlier than the
Declaration of Independence. People are very apt to leave out of sight

the "good old colony times" and speak of our country as scarcely more
than a hundred years old. Sometimes we hear the presidency of George
Washington spoken of as part of "early American history;" but we
ought not to forget that when Washington was born the commonwealth
of Virginia was already one hundred and twenty-five years old. The
first governor of Massachusetts was born three centuries ago, in 1588,
the year of the Spanish Armada. Suppose we take the period of 282
years between the English settlement of Virginia and the inauguration
of President Benjamin Harrison, and divide it in the middle. That gives
us the year 1748 as the half-way station in the history of the American
people. There were just as many years of continuous American history
before 1748 as there have been since that date. That year was famous
for the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which put an end to a war between
England and France