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 Parliament proposed in 1764 to make them pay a small fraction of the cost of the late war, they called it ‘oppression’, and prepared to rebel. ‘We are Whigs,’ they said; ‘Whigs always resist Oppression. You English Whigs did so in 1688.’

There were two results from this. In the first place the great Whig families were already sore at King George's attempts to take his ministers without consulting them. And, when they saw the King and his ministers set upon compelling the Americans to pay the tax, they began to denounce the very things of which they had formerly been the champions, namely, the Empire, the Army and the Navy. America was right, they said, to resist such ‘oppression’. Even the great William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, said this. And so the whole meanings of the words ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ were completely changed. The Whig became a person who cared little for the Empire, and, occasionally, even supported the enemies of his country, just as the Tory of Anne's reign had done. And the Tories became, for a season, the true patriots, as the Whigs of Anne’s reign had been.

The second result was that we had to fight our Colonies, and that we failed to beat them. It was a hopeless business from the first. The distance was too great, the spaces of America were too vast for us to hold by force, even if we had won in battle. The quarrels in our Parliament were too fierce to allow of success. We had no great minister at home, and no great general in America. The colonists called a Congress at Philadelphia; declared themselves to be independent; and in 1776 took the name of the ‘United States of America’. Blood had already been shed