Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/697

Rh of their tragical precipitation is something most uncommon; for it is the defect of history ordinarily to read men's characters backwards, and to judge their whole past by what they eventually did.

If such an English history of the American Revolution could be epitomized for use in schools, so as to present not only the facts, but the feelings of the time—to embody the author's parallel view—we can imagine nothing which would do more to disabuse the forever rising generation of the belief that it was the English people who were warring upon the American people in that struggle, or more to imbue those to whom the future belongs with the fraternal sentiment at present more evident in England than in America. Of course the author had no such conscious purpose, and we do not suppose that Mr. Archibald R. Colquhoun had the desire to lure us to our democratic undoing in his praise of our imperial expansion when he wrote his very readable volume on "Greater America." There could hardly be, however, a work which we could less wish to have epitomized for the use of schools than his, if it is at all desirable that our children should grow up in the ideals of humanity which animated the American Revolutionists on both sides of the Atlantic. He sees the difficulty, the absurdity, of a republic with such inherited ideals as ours attempting to realize them in the government of the colonial possessions which fell to us from the war with Spain, and he feels for our embarrassment. But he is very frank with us, and tells that we must put them by, if we hope to get on, as Great Britain has undoubtedly got on with her imperial dependencies. The rights of man are not for man when he is brown, or when he is yellow, or even when he is pale olive; representation goes with taxation only when the skin is absolutely white. Mr. Colquhoun congratulates us upon the coolness with which we have practically ignored our inherited ideals in our colonial empire, but he thinks we would be more comfortable if we denied them outright, and ne invites us to observe that we have done this already in the nullification of the negroes' constitutional right to vote in the South; though he by no means likes the cruelty with which the negroes seem to be used among us. He is a very kindly man and a most amiable though outspoken witness of the embarrassments which have flowed to us from our aggrandizements. Nothing could be more flattering to our national vanity than his recognition of our accomplished and destined greatness. This, as he studies it in such interesting chapters as those on our Pacific and Caribbean expansion, on the incidental problems concerning our civil and military service, on Pan-Americanism in South America and Canada, appears as unquestionable to him as to any most convinced or inspired native expansionist, and he no more spares the doubting Americans than the undoubting American does. He speaks of those who criticise the government policy in the Philippines as "demagogues, cranks, and fanatics," meaning perhaps such demagogues as Professor William James, such cranks as Mr. Schurz or Mr. Schurman, such fanatics as Mark Twain.

Mr. Colquhoun knows his "Greater America" better in bulk than in detail; there he could often be faulted; and he arrives at some of his conclusions with a rapidity which suggests the notion of his arriving with them. That is necessarily the journalistic way, however, and journalism of a very good kind is the impression which his entertaining and well-put-together volume leaves. It can certainly help to do that office which we have imagined literature doing, by increasing the kindness between the English and American imperialists, who will behold their likeness in the mirror held up to them, and be drawn as cordially together as other sorts of Englishmen and Americans are by such a history as Sir George Trevelyan's. We cannot all live in the ideal, and the case of those who live in the actual is not the less to be considered because just now they seem to be having it all their own way.