The Inevitable Revolution

In a 1942 essay in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Peter Drucker offered his thoughts on “the great political thinkers of the generation of 1776, to whom we owe whatever freedom there has been in the Western world since.”

“The 13 colonies would sooner or later have become independent as one nation in the normal course of events,” Drucker wrote. “The best thinkers in England—especially [Edmund] Burke—fully realized that the colonists had outgrown the old dependence. The American Revolution was only the concrete point at which the foreseeable and foreseen event of independence took place. . . .

“Full self-government had become a foregone conclusion as soon as England had given the Colonists military self-government with their own troops under native commanders. The French and Indian War probably made eventual independence almost inevitable; and that war should right be regarded as fully as important in the history of American nationhood as the Declaration of Independence itself. There is a straight line from George Washington, the militia officer with his independent command in the French and Indian War, to George Washington, the Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the United States.”

We wish all of our Dx readers and their families a happy and safe Independence Day.