The Forces in Conflict 155
origin of the whole controversy, would willingly pay an agreed- upon share toward
military and imperial expenses, by taxing themselves through such a parliament as
he outlined.
As among Americans themselves, it is clear that the Revolution involved a con-
test between men committed either to a more popular or a more aristocratic trend
in government and society. Had the loyalists returned, received back their property,
and resumed the positions of prestige and public influence which many of them
had once enjoyed, it seems unlikely that the subsequent history of the United
States would have been like the history that we know.
The Revolution: Britain and Europe
As between Britain and America, however, the question of internal change in
America was less explicit. The British government never took official cognizance of
loyalist plans. Some influence of loyalist thinking, and of British ideas resembling
those of the loyalists, can be seen in the Canadian provinces, where most of the
loyalists settled. But Britain had no such plans for the thirteen colonies that re-
belled. Indeed, it had no plans at all, beyond the suppression of rebellion.
When hostilities began, there was a good deal of unity in England for a forcible
disciplining of the Americans. Many shared the sentiments of Henry Dundas,
who felt “his pride hurt, his spirit roused, his rage kindled” by the very hint that
England could not “support her pretensions to empire.”^30 As the war dragged on,
and especially after the intervention of France, these martial enthusiasms began to
subside. A war that began with wide national backing, to which only a few Whigs
and a few radicals took exception, turned by 1780 into a war which everyone
wanted to be rid of, with only George III persisting in his original policy, and even
Lord North plaintively trying to resign.
The effects of the American Revolution in Britain and in Europe are described
later. Here it need only be said, to place that Revolution more fully in its larger
setting, that, just as some Americans upheld British authority and sympathized
with the aristocratic order of Europe, so there were some Europeans, and some
even in the British governing class, who favored American independence, and who
sympathized with the more democratic order of which the United States was al-
ready the symbol. The duke of Richmond, the first peer ever to move a parliamen-
tary reform bill in the House of Lords, and who in fact favored universal suffrage
for the House of Commons, also moved in the Lords, in April 1778, recognition
of the independence of the United States.
The British government was in fact seriously handicapped, in its conflict with
the colonies, by a number of embarrassments both domestic and international.
France gave secret military aid to the insurgents from the beginning. Open French
participation, and French attack upon Ireland, had to be considered. In December
1777, shortly before the signing of the Franco- American alliance, Lord North for-
warded to George III a secret report from Paris. It affirmed that a French army
30 Parliamentary History, XIX, 1088, April 10, 1778.