Imagine America and England without the Revolution

By Bernie Quigley - 05/09/12 09:57 AM ET

Thanks to reader Stephen Bone for his generous comment yesterday re: France and “the colonies.” He adds, of my picking on the French, “After all, without France we would not have a country.” But historic time presents us with a riddle. What would America be like without the American Revolution? Possibly much like it is today.

Consider what Hitler might have felt when he drove his troops into Paris on June 14, 1940. Americans held still for two years without defending their French allies of the Revolution. Why would they bother to defend their natural enemies, England? But aid we did and we culturally rebonded with England via the invasion of France with both our armies.

In the end, we were naturally closer to England than we were to France. So suppose they had just worked out the tax thing together in 1776? Both the Revolution and World Wars I and II on England’s behalf could have been avoided. A diminished post-Victorian British Empire must have seemed an easy target. The Germany navy smelled blood in the water as early as the Queen’s Jubilee in 1897 when Victoria was in her last years. But would the Kaiser in 1914 and Hitler later have dared to challenge a realm so vast as a unified Anglosphere would have been between England the British regions had the American Revolution not occurred?

Here in New England taxes went up after the Revolution, although the farmers were promised they would go down. And are taxes worth fighting for anyway? And had all the English-speaking realms together banned slavery as England did by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the American Civil War would have been avoided.

I couldn’t help notice yesterday that Australia’s economy is booming. It is the first major economy since the start of the financial crisis to record a surplus. One of my sons works there and another heads to England next year to study. They feel quite as home there as they do here. Increasingly, with a little help from the Beatles, Chef Gordon Ramsay, Harry Potter, British journalists and editors like Stuart Varney and the like, it appears that things would have naturally occurred this way in time had not the Revolution broken us apart, and required two horrendous world wars to bring us back together. Back to where we appear to have been heading in the first place.