There was a doubt in the minds of many people, which we have often heard uttered in recent times, with reference to the French people in their long series of revolutions, and equally so with the Spanish-American republics with their almost annual revolutions, whether these words of Winthrop were not correct, and that the people were really incapable of self-government. It was a doubt which the revolution did not silence, for the disturbing elements which had their issue in the Shay Rebellion, The Whiskey Insurrection and the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, in 1781, were embers of a fire, smothered, not quenched, which rendered state government insecure till it was welded into the Federal Union. There was a widespread dislike to the levelling principles of New England, to the arrogant, restless and ambitious policy of its demagogues; to their manifest desire to invent or discover grievances, foment quarrels and keep the wound open and festering.[63] [63] See Adams' Works, Vol. II, pp. 350, 410. Those who rebelled in good faith did so because they feared that the power of Parliament to tax them moderately to raise money for their own defence might be used sometime in the future for a less worthy purpose, and then they would all be "slaves." Their argument led to mob rule and anarchy, till the adaption of the Federal Constitution, after the close of the Revolutionary War. The opinion of such an authority as Lecky on our revolutionary movements must be worthy of thoughtful attention; and his opinion is this: "Any nation might be proud of the shrewd, brave, prosperous and highly intelligent yeomen who flocked to the American camps; but they were very different from those who defended the walls of Leyden, or immortalized the field of Bannockburn. Few of the great pages of history are less marked by the stamp of heroism than the American Revolution and perhaps the most formidable of the difficulties which Washington had to encounter were in his own camp."[64] And he concludes his survey of the movement with these words: "In truth the American people, though in general unbounded believers in progress, are accustomed, through a kind of curious modesty, to do themselves a great injustice by the extravagant manner in which they idealize their past. It has almost become as commonplace that the great nation which in our own day has shown such an admirable combination of courage, devotion and humanity in its gigantic Civil War, and which since that time has so signally falsified the prediction of its enemies and put to shame all the nations of Europe by its unparalleled efforts in paying off its national debt, is of far lower moral type than its ancestors at the time of the War of Independence. This belief appears to me essentially false. The nobility and beauty of Washington can, indeed, hardly be paralleled. Several of the other leaders of the Revolution were men of ability and public