spirit, and few armies have ever shown a nobler self-devotion than that which remained with Washington through the dreary winter at Valley Forge. But the army that bore those sufferings was a very small one, and the general aspect of the American people during the contest was far from heroic or sublime. The future destinies and greatness of the English race must necessarily rest mainly with the mighty nation which has arisen beyond the Atlantic, and that nation may well afford to admit that its attitude during the brief period of its enmity to England has been very unduly extolled. At the same time, the historian of that period would do the Americans a great injustice if he judged them only by the revolutionary party, and failed to recognize how large a proportion of their best men had no sympathy with the movement."[65] [64] Lecky, "American Revolution," p. 230. [65] Lecky's "American Revolution," p. 375. Our native historians and the common run of Fourth of July orators have treated their countrymen badly for a hundred years. They have given the world to understand that we are the degenerate children of a race of giants, statesmen, and moralists, who flourished for a few years about a century ago and then passed away. An impartial examination of the records would show that we are wiser, better, more benevolent, quite as patriotic and brave as the standard heroes of 1776. We may give our ancestors credit for many admirable virtues without attempting to maintain that a multitude of unlettered colonists, scattered along the Atlantic coast, hunting, fishing, smuggling, and tilling the soil for a slender livelihood, and fighting Indians and wild beasts to save their own lives, possessed a vast fund of political virtue and political intelligence, and left but little of either to their descendants. The public is beginning to tire of this tirade of indiscriminate eulogy, and the public taste is beginning to reject it as a form of defamation. And so the ripening judgment of our people is beginning to demand portraits of our ancestors painted according to the command that Cromwell gave the artist; to paint his features, warts, blotches, and all, and to demand an account of our forefathers in which we shall learn to speak of them as they were.