Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/9

 Rh tea—because it enabled the British East India Company to undersell the tea smugglers. The Boston Tea party was nothing but the dumping overboard of the tea in question.

Taken all together the British laws for the governing of the colonies and their exploitation in the interest of certain British wealthy and ruling classes hampered the industrial life of the colonies and fettered the further development of the productive forces of America, Further industrial evolution was impossible without revolution. So revolution had to come—and it came. This disposes of all the current bunk about America being "unrevolutionary," of the American method being "not revolution but evolution," of the natural unnaturalness of revolutionary methods to the Anglo-Saxon and all the other master-class twaddle that masquerades as sociology and history.

All the available evidence tends to prove that the revolutionaries were a minority of the population. Most of the "aristocracy," the large land-owners of the coast with the exception of the plantation owners of the South, almost all office-holders, the clergy of the Church of England, the more eminent lawyers and physicians, and the "legitimate" merchants—large merchants who did no smuggling—these were the active Tories or royalists. The Tory party included, in the words of the historian Jameson, "more than half of the most educated, wealthy and hitherto respected classes." With them was a great indifferent mass having no great interest in change. They provided over 25,000 colonial troops to the British army. The active revolutionists were the smuggling merchants, manufacturers and speculators in western land, backed by the small farmers, frontiersmen and artisans, who were won to their cause by such issues as paper money and thru the glittering and vague promises of the Declaration of Independence.

How could the minority of the population which made up the revolutionary army fight against the combined forces of a more or less equal number of active counter-reyolutionaries and the British regular troops more numerous and better equipped and supplemented by hired Hessian soldiers?