Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1898 — WHY AMERICA REBELLED. [ARTICLE]

WHY AMERICA REBELLED.

Senator Lodge’s View of the Cause for the Revolution. Senator Lodge’s “Story of the Revolution” Is now running in Scribner's. America rebelled, he says, not because the colonies were oppressed, but because their inhabitants were the freest people then in the world, and did not mean to suffer oppression. They did not enter upon resistance to England to redress intolerable grievances, but because they saw a policy adopted which they rightly believed threatened the freedom they possessed. As Burke said, they judged “the pressure of the grievances by the badness of the principle,” and “snuffed the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” They were the most dangerous people in the world to meddle with, because they were ready to fight, not to avenge wrongs which indeed they had not suffered, but to maintain principles on which their rights and liberty rested. The English Ministry had begun to assail those principles; they were making clumsy and hesitating attempts to take money from the colonies without leave of the people; and George, in a belated way, was trying to be a king and revive an image of the dead and gone personal monarchy of Charles I. Hence came resistance, very acute In one colony, shared more or less by all. Hence the Congress In Philadelphia and the great popular movement starting as If inevitably in that quiet colonial town among the freest portion of the liberty-loving English race. As to the profound significance of the first colonial Congress he says: “To the courts of Europe, engaged at the moment in meaningless intrigues, either foreign or domestic, and all alike grown quite dim now, the colonial Congress was not even obscure, it was not visible at all. Yet, thoughtfully regarded, It deserved consideration much better than anything which just then engaged the attention of Europe. Fifteen years later its utterances were to be quoted as' authority and Its examples emulated in Paris when an ancient monarchy was tattering to its fall. It was the start of a great movement which was to sweep on until checked at Waterloo. This same movement was to begin its march again in 1830 in the streets of Paris and carry the reform of the British Parliament two years later. It was to break forth once more in 1848 and keep steadily on advancing and conquering, although Its work is still Incomplete even among the nations of Western civilization. Yet, no one in Europe heeded it at the moment, and they failed to see that it meant not simply a colonial quarrel, not merely the coming of a new nation, but the rising of the people to take their share in the governments of the earth. It was in fact the first step in the great democratic movement which has made history ever since. The great columns were even then beginning to move, and the beat of the drums could be heard faintly in the quiet Philadelphia streets. They were still distant, but they were ever drawing nearer and their roll was rising louder and louder, until at last they sounddd in the ears of men from Concord bridge to Moscow-’’