"The outcome defied categories. 46 Was it a victory for principle or expediency? For the rights of man or the rules of statecraft? For lightness of being or heaviness of hand? For a republic or, as Washington himself put it, an "empire"? To say "all of the above" dodges the question, but usefully. For if Burke was right that governments should balance dissatisfactions, if Elizabeth was right to set precedents rather than be bound by them, if Machiavelli was right to prefer proportionality to consistency, then the Americans weren't just making it up as they went along. 47 Even Augustus might have been impressed by what their leaders did next: they staged a second revolution to correct failures in the first, but with so skillful a mix of stealth and persuasion that the country didn't grasp, until after it had happened, what had just happened. 48"