MEN I HAVE PAINTED
eloquently and untiringly until he met Mr. Wilson in America. From that time there rose in front of him a double staircase, and he is still wondering whether he should go down on the left side or up on the right. This was my opportunity to avenge myself for the failure of the portrait, and to express the resentment I harboured against him for his cavalier treatment of the artist, and I wrote him a few letters on the political situation.
Ever since and even before the end of the Napoleonic wars it has been a characteristic of the English race to ignore the possibility of another great war. The colonists of America prior to the Revolution, and after the conquest of the French and their Indian allies in Canada, settled down peacefully to develop the land. In disregard of the murmurs of discontent against the Crown Government, the people remained to the last unprepared for the impending struggle for independence, and it was only when the Government sent over soldiers to enforce a taxation that was thought to be unreasonable, that the colonists hastily armed themselves for an unequal struggle against trained troops. We know that the inefficiency, in every respect save one—the knowledge derived from the Indians of rough, backwoods fighting—in the meagre armies of General Washington, caused that unfortunate campaign to be prolonged for seven years. Had the colonists been prepared as they should have been, the Crown forces would most probably have been driven from the country, without much loss to either side, in a few months, or less.
In the same country, inhabited principally at that time by people of so-called Anglo-Saxon blood, or where the institutions and habits of the English influenced all the others, certain disputes between the Northern and Southern
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