Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/207

 CHAPTER VI. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. (17611776.) THE struggle between Great Britain and her colonies in America, after it had become acute, and the struggle which followed, over the form of government of the American States, after the War of Independ- ence, concerned one and the same thing, the theory, in public and private relations, of legal right ; the popular name for which, both in England and America, was liberty or freedom. It is proper to put aside, as declamatory, the violence of the few on the one side who flouted the idea that the colonies or colonists had " rights " against the State which made them, and of the many on the other who profaned the name of liberty or used it in ignorance ; and then it will be found that both sides to the struggle, and all sides, sooner or later, came to agree upon the question at issue. Every argument, finally, as the struggle went on, planted itself in legal right. Whether the question was of the issuance of "writs of assistance," or of the extension of admiralty jurisdiction, or of the general powers of Parliament over the colonies whether it was one of private or public right it was in reality a question of legal right. Right according to English law is a train of light running through the whole dark time of trouble and anxiety by which both sides professed to be led. The general meaning too of legal right was agreed upon by most of the leaders and thinkers, on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans had learned from England that legal right exists where States and men have and hold their own without unjust interruption, and where, in time of need, one must yield to another, but no further than need requires; which is but saying that legal right exists where equal rights prevail. This was the common law of England, which was the "birthright" of Americans. If the teaching that legal right imports equality before the law had not, by the middle of the eighteenth century, come to be universal in England, it was at any rate the general teaching of the Courts, of Parliament, and of jurists there. It had long been the prevailing idea in America, as doctrine; it became universal as law, from the War of Independence. Indeed the few Englishmen who CH. VI.