Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 301, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1912 — TORIES HARSHLY USED [ARTICLE]

TORIES HARSHLY USED

WRITER GONDEMNB ACTION DURING REVOLUTIONARY WAR. In Life 1 of John Hancock Lorenzo Bear* Points Out That Decree of Banishment Was a More Bitter Story Than Evangeline. If the Tories had seen the crown triumph, their treatment of the rebels, as they called the Whigs, might have been no better than they themselves received. The human nature of a single race is not changed by party names or the fortune of war. Therefore, it is an interesting speculation to .conjecture what a victorious Tory would have done with defeated patriots.-- It is safe to say that Samuel Adams and John Hancock would havo been sent to England for trial, if not for execution as traitors; but toward the people at large there was a growing spirit of conciliation as the war went on, for reasons which cannot ba detailed here. It is unfortunate that it cannot ba Bald with equal truth that as the patriot cause looked more hopeful, and even w'hen independence was assured, the hostility toward resident or ban?_ ished loyalists was diminished. During the war every species of intimidation had been used to bring them into the patriot ranks; indignities not usually practiced in dignified warfare had been thrust upon them. Eighty-fiva thousand had been driven into Canadian exile alone, besides other thousands who had fled to other British possessions, leaving houses and lands, business and friends. Confiscation followed exile, with poverty and distreaa in Btrange and inhospitable regions. The Acadian story which excitea American -sympathy has at least th* mitigating feature of removal south' ward to gentler climes; while the Colonial dispersion was chiefly into northern latitudes, which our Saxon ancestors used to designate as the domain of a chilly goddess with a name whfch, by a singular inversion of meaning, and the addition of one letter, now belongs to a place of fiery torment , So the exiles themselves used to place in the same category "Hell, Hull and Halifax.” Yet the best terms that Great Britain could secure for its loyal colonists when terms»of peace were agreed upon were, that/congress should “reoommend leniency to the several states" in their treatment of Tories. For its own part the home government employed as many as it could, and for the temporary support of the unemployed it expended more than $200,000 annually before the end of the war. Afterward additional burdens were ungrudgingly assumed for the expatriated; five hundred acres of land to each family, building mat% rials, tools and even food. In this way nearly nine million dollars were spent in Canada before 1787. - In’addition, some nineteen million dollars were paid for losses of property by the well-to-do on their claims for forty millions. Among these were governors, judges, councillors, commissioners, college presidents and clergymen. After all that was done for them they were dissatisfied and unhappy. In Canada they were wretched; in England they were disregarded and thrown back upon the companionship of the lower classes. There was little left for them but to drag out a lonely existence to the end of their days.—From “John Hancock,” by Lorenzo Sears.

Lands of Fire. It is rather singular that both of the "landß of fire” are near the ©old extremities of the globe—lceland, far to the northward, and Tierra del Fuego, remotely south. Iceland, to the eye, seems at first glance to be better named by the cold appellation. Its glacial fields are not only numerous, but in some-cases these and the connected snow stretches are hundreds of square miles In extent. But only a little travel into the Interior, say to the site of the ancient Icelandic Parliament at Thingvalllr, discloses miles upon miles of such decolation as is possible only in a "land of flreu,” It is a very Island of volcanoes, and, while they have been exceedingly well behaved for a hundred years or so, the great hot springs In the neighborhood of Reykjavik, the capital, indicate that t£e subterranean heat, if passive, Is still very much alive. Huge glaciers also mark the “cold land of fire” at the other end of the earth. Thus each of the two parts of the universe is properly named, whether the name be worm ol cold.