Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights. George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and liberties of human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!” All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body. Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of the rights of Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of a right for its own sake--the politics born of the theory that one has the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likes with one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans were human beings--a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time of war--and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is,