The only possible explanation of the case seems to be found, not in the resolutions themselves, but in the special interpretation put upon them by Patrick Henry in the speech which, according to parliamentary usage, he seems to have made in moving their adoption. What was that interpretation? In the true answer to that question, no doubt, lies the secret of the resistance which his motion encountered. For, down to that day, no public body in America, and no public man, had openly spoken of a war with Great Britain in any more decisive way than as a thing highly probable, indeed, but still not inevitable. At last Patrick Henry spoke of it, and he wanted to induce the convention of Virginia to speak of it, as a thing inevitable. Others had said, "The war must come, and will come,--unless certain things are done." Patrick Henry, brushing away every prefix or suffix of uncertainty, every half-despairing "if," every fragile and pathetic "unless," exclaimed, in the hearing of all men: "Why talk of things being now done which can avert the war? Such things will not be done. The war is coming: it has come already." Accordingly, other conventions in the colonies, in adopting similar resolutions, had merely announced the probability of war. Patrick Henry would have this convention, by adopting his resolutions, virtually declare war itself. In this alone, it is apparent, consisted the real priority and offensiveness of Patrick Henry's position as a revolutionary statesman on the 23d of March, 1775. In this alone were his resolutions "premature." The very men who opposed them because they were to be understood as closing the door against the possibility of peace, would have favored them had they only left that door open, or even ajar. But Patrick Henry demanded of the people of Virginia that they should treat all further talk of peace as mere prattle; that they should seize the actual situation by a bold grasp of it in front; that, looking upon the war as a fact, they should instantly proceed to get ready for it. And therein, once more, in revolutionary ideas, was Patrick Henry one full step in advance of his contemporaries. Therein, once more, did he justify the reluctant praise of Jefferson, who was a member of that convention, and who, nearly fifty years afterward, said concerning Patrick Henry to a great statesman from Massachusetts: "After all, it must be allowed that he was our leader in the measures of the Revolution in Virginia, and in that respect more is due to him than to any other person.... He left all of us far behind."[155]