Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
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| the citizens were much readier with their lives than their purses; and though they did not share the expense of England’s fleets, they furnished in the last colonial war nearly twenty thousand of the seamen who manned them. |
| However, admitting all that can be urged against them does not alter the fact—by none more freely conceded than by English historians nowadays—that on the main question the mutinous provinces were in the right. They were in many ways well treated, but they were never treated as equals, and they were sometimes treated badly. They needed and wished, not mingled favors and injuries, but justice. There were many public men in England who strove to do right by the colonies; but there were very many others who looked on their dependencies purely from the standpoint of British interest. When in the warfare of factions and parties the latter wielded the power of government, they were certain to produce such intense irritation in the minds of Americans that even the non-fulfilment of their plans or the return of the friends of America to power, could not allay the ill feeling. There were numerous English statesmen of high rank and great influence who avowedly wished to check and hamper the growth of the colonies; who desired to stop the westward march of the settlers, and to keep the continent beyond the Alleghanies as a |