The passionate speech of Patrick Henry in Virginia,
in 1763, which made him famous, and was the forerunner of his
later appeal, "Give me Liberty or give me Death, " related to so
prosaic a question as the right of disallowance by England of an
act passed by a colonial legislature, a right exercised long and
often before that time and to this day a part of the
constitutional machinery of the British Empire. Few men have
lived more serenely poised than Washington, yet, as we have seen,
he hated the British with an implacable hatred. He was a humane
man. In earlier years, Indian raids on the farmers of Virginia
had stirred him to "deadly sorrow," and later, during his retreat
from New York, he was moved by the cries of the weak and infirm.
Yet the same man felt no touch of pity for the Loyalists of the
Revolution. To him they were detestable parricides, vile
traitors, with no right to live. When we find this note in
Washington, in America, we hardly wonder that the high Tory,
Samuel Johnson, in England, should write that the proposed
taxation was no tyranny, that it had not been imposed earlier
because "we do not put a calf into the plough; we wait till he is
an ox," and that the Americans were "a race of convicts, and
ought to be thankful for anything which we allow them short of
hanging.
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