Posterity can also, however, understand that the struggle was not between undiluted virtue on the one side and undiluted vice on the other.

Some eighty years after the American Revolution the Republic created by the Revolution endured the horrors of civil war rather than accept its own disruption.

In 1776 even the most liberal Englishmen felt a similar passion for the continued unity of the British Empire.

Time has reconciled all schools of thought to the unity lost in the case of the Empire and to the unity preserved in the case of the Republic, but on the losing side in each case good men fought with deep conviction..