There is perhaps no better place to discuss the justice of the Revolution than right here. Even to-day the illegality, the utter wrongfulness of the American position, is occasionally raised among us by those who see the great obligations to the mother country under which the colonies lay, and who recall the needless hardships suffered by the wretched Tories, the martyrs of a lost cause. Doubtless wrongs were inflicted in the course of the struggle, and the great expenditures of England were in large part unrequited. But it must be remembered that the world had not yet reached the point where the losers in a war were gently treated, and that no amount of financial obligation will ever compel to the acceptance of political servitude. By habit of mind and force of circumstances America had developed a political theory puzzlingly novel to the old world and as yet not thoroughly understood by the new. It was upon this unformulated theory that all future differences were to arise. It interfered in all affairs in which the question arose: Should the colonies be governed, and especially should they be taxed, without a voice in their own affairs? No one in England doubted that Parliament had a right to tax America without its consent. Customs restrictions were long familiar. As to internal taxation, why, it was asked, should the colonies have a voice in Parliament? Birmingham and Manchester, great centres of population, were not represented, while that uninhabited heap of stones, Old Sarum, sent a member to the Commons. Resting on these abuses, even Pitt and Burke were content to argue that taxation of America was just. For them it was a question whether that right should be exercised. With the best will in the world to be on good terms with the mother country, America could not agree in such reasoning. The case had nothing to do with obligations. As for these, the colonists knew that England would never have won against the French in Canada without their aid. But that was not the question. Should those who for a hundred and thirty-five years had paid no tax to England pay one now? Were the people who for seventy years had drawn a fine distinction between paying their governor of their own accord and paying him at the command of the king, and who in every year of royal governorship had made their contention plain--were they to be satisfied to pay taxes because Birmingham did?