Alas! But evidently the Dean saw the future of our continent no better than the Ministry saw their duty with regard to it.
Unlike in spirit was Matthew Robinson, a contemporary friend of America, whose able and elaborate tracts[460] in successive editions are now forgotten, except so far as revived by the notice of Professor Smyth.[461] His vindication of the Colonies, at the time of the Boston Port Bill, was complete, without the harshness of Tucker, and he did not hesitate to present the impossibility of conquering them. “What expectation or probability,” he asks, “can there be of sending from hence armies capable to conquer and subdue so great a force of men defending and defended by such a continent?”[462] Then, while depicting English mastery of the sea, he says: “We may do whatever a fleet can. Very true; but it cannot sail all over North America.”[463] The productions of this enlightened author cannot have been without effect. Doubtless they helped the final acknowledgment of independence. When will the “Old Mortality” appear, to discover and restore his monument?
The able annotator of Lord Bacon was too sweeping, when he said that on the great American question all England was wrong, “except _one_ man.” Robinson was as right as the Dean, and there were others also. The “Monthly Review,” in an article on the Dean’s appeal for separation, said: “This, however, is not a new idea. It has frequently occurred to others.”[464] Even Soame Jenyns, a life-long member of Parliament, essayist, poet, defender of Christianity, while upholding the right to tax the Colonies, is said to have accepted the idea of “total separation”:--
“Let all who view th’ instructive scene, And patronize the plan, Give thanks to Gloucester’s honest Dean, For, Tucker, thou’rt the man.”[465]
In a better spirit, and with affecting earnestness, John Cartwright, once of the Royal Navy, and known as Major from his rank in the Nottinghamshire Militia, followed the Dean, in 1774, with a series of letters collected in a pamphlet entitled “American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain,” where he insists upon separation, and thenceforward a friendly league, “that the true and lasting welfare of both countries can be promoted.”[466] In enforcing his conclusion the author says: “When we talk of asserting our sovereignty over the Americans, do we foresee to what fatal lengths it will carry us? Are not those nations increasing with astonishing rapidity? _Must they not, in the nature of things, cover in a few ages that immense continent like a swarm of bees?_”[467] Then again: “We may, indeed, by means of fleets and armies, maintain a precarious tyranny over the Americans for a while; but the most shallow politicians must foresee what this would end in.”[468] Then, in reply to the Dean: “’Tis a pity so able a writer had not discovered that the Americans have a right to choose their own governors, and thence enforced the necessity of his proposed separation as a religious duty, no less than a measure of national policy.”[469] Cartwright continued at home the conflicts of principle involved in our War of Independence, and became an English Reformer. Honor to his name!