is proved to be, by reason and the experience of all ages and countries, cannot be a rightful or legal power. For, as an excellent Bishop of the Church of England argues,* "the ends of Government cannot be answered by a total dissolution of all happiness at present, and of all hopes for the future."

The just inference therefore from these premises would be an exclusion of any power of Parliament over these Colonies, rather than the admission of an unbounded power.

We well know that the Colonists are charged by many persons in Great Britain with attempting to obtain such an exclusion and a total independence on her. As well we know the accusation to be utterly false. We are become criminal in the sight of such persons, by refusing to be guilty of the highest crime against ourselves and our posterity. Nolumus leges AngliÆ mutari. This is the rebellion with which we are stigmatised. We have committed the like offence, that was objected by the polite and humane Fimbria against a rude Senator of his time. "We have disrespectfully refused to receive the whole weapon into our body." We could not do it and live. But that must be acknowledged to be a poor excuse, equally inconsistent with good breeding and the Supreme Legislature of Great Britain.

For these ten years past we have been incessantly† attacked. Hard is our fate, when to escape the character of rebels, we must be degraded into that of slaves; as if there was no medium between the two extremes of anarchy and despotism, where innocence and freedom could find repose and safety.

Why should we be exhibited to mankind as a people, adjudged by Parliament unworthy of freedom? The thought alone is insupportable. Even those unhappy persons, who have had the misfortune of being born under the yoke of bondage imposed by the cruel laws, if they may be called laws, of the land where they received their birth, no sooner breathe the air of England, though they touch her shores only by accident,* than they instantly become freemen. Strange contradiction!† The same Kingdom at the same time, the asylum and the bane of Liberty.

To return to the charge against us, we can safely appeal to that Being, from whom no thought can be concealed, that our warmest wish and utmost ambition is, that we and our posterity may ever remain subordinate to, and dependent upon, our parent state. This submission our reason approves, our affection dictates, our duty commands, and our interest enforces.

If this submission indeed implies a dissolution of our Constitution, and a renunciation of our liberty, we should be unworthy of our relation to her, if we should not frankly declare, that we regard it with‡ horrour; and every true Englishman will applaud this just distinction and candid declaration. Our defence necessarily touches chords in unison with the fibres of his honest heart. They must vibrate in sympathetick tones. If we, his kindred, should be base enough to promise the humiliating subjection he could not believe us. We should suffer all the infamy of the engagement without finding the benefit expected from being thought as contemptible as we should undertake to be.

But this submission implies not such insupportable evils; and our amazement is inexpressible when we consider the gradual increase of these Colonies, from their slender beginnings in the last century to their late flourishing condition, and how prodigiously, since their settlement our parent state has advanced in wealth, force, and influence, till she is become the first power on the sea, and the envy of the world—that these our better days should not strike conviction into every mind, that the freedom and happiness of the Colonists are not inconsistent with her authority and prosperity.

must be acknowledged however, that the Commons are more than sound divines, for they improve upon the text,* and "count their loss for gain."

Statutes might grind us, while not an elector in England would know or regard our sufferings—if acquainted with them, he might think the statutes inflicting them, just and political, An open avowal has been made in Parliament that it is† "the indispensable duty of Parliament to tax the Colonies in order to ease the gentry and people of Great Britain." Let not Americans ever forget the lordly words! To understand them fully, we should consider—

Our dispute includes not only the present taxes laid upon us. The universal property of England was interested in Mr. Hampden's suit, about a few shillings. If the Crown had a right to those shillings, it had a right to every shilling of every man in the Kingdom. Great Britain is about one hundred and forty millions of pounds sterling in debt. If she can pay any part of that debt by taxing us, she may pay the whole by taxing us, if we can raise the money. If we cannot, yet as we are upbraided continually in pamphlets and papers with the richness of our houses, our furniture, our equipage, or tables, and our dress, she may be made to think we abound too much in these conveniences. If we are reduced to the condition of French peasants, it is no matter. We belong to the people of Great Britain: and all British subjects, but Americans, may do what they please with their own. "It is her indispensable duty, say their Lordships, to ease herself by taxing us;" and surely there is virtue enough left in the British Parliament, notwithstanding all the dreadful intelligence British writers send us over, to perform that "duty," exactly. But this is not all. There are certain wicked Frenchmen and Spaniards, that in every period of twenty or thirty years oblige Great Britain to add thirty or forty millions to her debt. Upon an average, since the Revolution, she runs annually in debt about a million and an half. Can it be expected her Ministers will be kinder to us than they have been to her? where will the demand upon us, where will our wretchedness stop, if we have not resolution enough to defend ourselves?

A statute intended to have force on the people of Great Britain, is the case of a state acting upon itself. A statute intended to have force on the people of America, is the case of one state acting upon another. The people of Great Britain, who in the first case are subject to the statute—in the second, are the absolute sovereigns who impose it on others,

"Virtual representation" then, as applied to Colonists, is, to borrow expressions pf the excellent Archbishop Tillotson, on another occasion, altering only two words—"An absurdity of that monstrous and massy weight, that no human authority or wit are able to support it.

"It will 'make the very pillars of St.' Stephens "crack, and require" more volumes to make it good than would fill" Westminster Hall.

Yet this most despicable notion has been the pretence for our fellow-subjects‡ clapping muskets to our breasts, and taking our money out of our pockets.

* Hoadley's Disc on Government.

† 4 Geo. 3, ch. 15. 4 Geo. 3, ch. 34. 5 Geo. 3, ch. 12. 5 Geo. 3, ch. 45. 6 Geo. 3, ch. 12. 6 Geo. 3, ch. 52. 7 Geo. 3, ch. 41. 7 Geo 3. ch. 46. 7 Geo. 3, ch. 59. 8 Geo. 3, ch. 22. The Resolves that Colonists may be tried in England under the thirty-fifth Henry the Eighth. The blockade of Boston—the Rhode-Island Court, &c. The statutes since the eighth year of this reign, relating to the Colonies, follow one another much in the same quick manner as before: but they could not be collected. Many of the statutes here mentioned, particularly those relating to the Admiralty Courts and the Commissioners of the Customs, are connected with a multitude of other statutes, by being compared with which the artifices will appear, that gradually departing from the laws of England, have at length invested these Courts and Commissioners with such new, unreasonable, unconstitutional, and dangerous powers.

* Somerset's case.

† To this contradiction, the following may be added—Her policy at once to keep peace with her natural enemies, and to provoke her natural friends, whose assistance one day—and that day seems to be approaching—in the vicissitudes of human affairs, great as she is, she may want; her interest, as she thinks, to protect and to oppress Protestant countries—to abhor a large standing army and yet voluntarily to put herself under the absolute necessity of perpetuating an immensely large one, to govern the many millions of slaves she expects soon to have on this vast Continent. Two of the shrewdest, though not best Emperors, that ever lived, Augustus and Tiberius, prohibited every man of distinction from setting his foot in Egypt,* because of the importance of that Province to Rome. But Great Britain, as if these numerous Provinces, much more remote from her than Egypt from Rome, were of little consequence, willingly obliges herself to trust a mighty armed power into the hands of a subject, in these Colonies, the tempting interest of which subject, and of the people, may engage them to unite in establishing an independent Empire, on her own model. Great Britain ought not to forget that Rome was ruined by keeping standing armies in her Provinces.

‡ The Privernates had revolted from the Romans, but were reduced. The question was what judgment should be given against them? This is Livy's account of the affair, it the twenty-first chapter of his eighth book:

"Quum ipsa per se res anceps esset, prout cujusque ingenium erat, atrocius mitiusve suadentibus; tum incertiora omnia unus ex Privernatibus legatis fecit, magis conditionis, in qua natus esset, quám præsantis necessitas, memor: qui, interrogatus á quodam tristioris sententiÆ auctore, quam pœnam meritos Privernates censeret? eam, inquit, quam merentur, qui se libertate dignos censent: cujus quum feroci responso infestiores factos videret consul eos, qui antč Privernatium causam impugnabant; ut ipse benignâ interrogatione mitius rcsponsum eliceret, Quid, si pœnam, inquit, remittimus vobis, qualem nos pacem vobiscum habituros speremus? Si bonam dederitis, inquit, et fidam et perpetuam: si malam, haud diuturnam. Tum verň minari, nee id ambiguč, Privernatem quidam, et illis vocibus ad reballandum incitari pacatos populos, pars melior senatűs ad meliora responsum trahere, et dicere, Viri, et liberi, vocem auditam, an credi posse, ullum populum, aut hominem denique, in ea conditione, cujus eum pÆniteat, diutůs, quŕm necesse sit, mansurum? Ibi pacem esse fidam, ubi voluntarii pacati sint: neque co loco, ubi servitutem esse velint, fidem sperandam esse. In hanc sententiam maximč consul ipse inclinavit animos, identidem ad principes sententiarum consulares, uti exaudiri posset ŕ pluribus, dicendo, Eos dernum, qui nihil, prÆterquam de libertate, cogitent, dignos esse, qui Romani fiant. Itaque et in senatu causam obtinuere, et ex auctoritate Patrum latum ad populum est, ut Privernatibus civitas dabitur."

* Philippians, iii. 7.

† These words are extracted from the Protest of the Lord on the repeal of the American Stamp Act—sec. 6.—Sixty-one Lords were against the repeal, thirty-three of them signed the Protest.

‡ "Win their hearts, and you may soon have their hands and purses," was the advice of old Lord Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth. She was wise enough to take it. The world knows the consequences.

* Tac.