should have arisen. When great interests are at stake, stake, and those who are engaged in them are free, and therefore high-minded, jealousies, points of pride, misunderstandings, are inevitable for a time But when each party is in the right in some things, and neither in the wrong in all, these, and the effects of them, last only for a time; the cloud passes away, and the sun shines forth, again.

Let us examine the subjects of difference between us.

You complain of us, because, in a declaratory Statute, Parliament asserted aright to bind you by its regulations in all cases whatever; and we complain of you, because you assert that Parliament has no right to bind you in any case whatever. But it was you who first set up the last of last of these pretensions, and you forced Parliament, in order to provide against encroachments, until limits were constitutionally settled, to meet it with the first. But claims so widely worded, are words, and no more. In the votes of your Assemblies, and the declaratory words of our Statute, they stand only as records that there have been unhappy differences between England and her Colonies: for surely you mean not by your assertion to preclude Parliament from the power of disabling you to ruin England, nor we in ours to give it a power of ruining America. There was a time when our ancestors seemed to differ as much about the terms resistance and non-resistance, relatively to the rights of the subject, as their posterity do now upon the terms supremacy and independence, relatively to the rights of Great Britain and America. Yet they in reality could only differ about the degree of provocation which justified resistance, and we in reality can only differ about the extent to which the exercise of the claims of the two countries may be carried. The Revolution, with the explanations it led to, discovered to them that they agreed upon the degree of the one; and the present emergency, with the explanations to which it should lead, may perhaps discover to us that we agree upon the other.

If, indeed, under the objection to the supremacy of Britain, you mean to deny to the executive part of our Constitution to the King, the power of appointing those Officers of Revenue, Law, and Government, whom he has been accustomed to appoint, of putting a negative upon the Bills of your Assemblies, of sending forces for the protection of his subjects and Dominions, with the other usual powers of the Crown; if you mean to deny to the judicial part of our Constitution, the right of a Supreme Court of Judicature in England, to receive appeals from your Courts of Justice; if you mean to deny to the legislative part of our Constitution, to the Parliament, the power to regulate your commerce for the mutual benefit of both countries, we shall indeed stake the fate of the British Empire on the contest; not for our own interests alone, but for hours, and those of human kind; for if you are permitted to throw off these badges of supremacy, as mad-men may call them, you are that instant independent States; you will form yourselves into independent Principalities, Republicks, and we fear Anarchies. A new political system will arise, not in Europe alone, but in the world. Foreign Nations will intrigue in your Assemblies; you will engage in wars with them, with us, and with your sister Provinces. This is not all. In Governments formed suddenly, and which, therefore, must be imperfect, you will fall into dissensions among yourselves, so that all the miseries of foreign, of civil, and of domestick war, will be accumulated on your heads; We wish that your Congress, which is so learned in the principles of the great Montesguieu, were equally learned in the condition of the Greek States, during the Peloponnesian war, a condition exactly similar to what yours would be, as described by the great Thucydides. The individuals of it would there learn, that those demagogues, who, from restlessness of temper, or ambition of making themselves conspicuous above others, plunged their countries into disorders and calamities, were often the first to fall by the hands of their countrymen

But if you mean, under the objection to the supremacy of Great Britain, to deny her the exercise of the power of imposing taxes upon you, without the consent of your Assemblies, the exemption you contend for deserves a very different attention. If you claim it as a matter of right, derived from authority, we must refuse you; because no Charter, except one of one Province, gives it to you, and long practice and many Statutes have taken it from you; and because the position, that there can be no taxation where there is no representation, is a jingle of words, in which, in point of reasoning, the conclusion does not follow from the premises, and which is disproved in point of fact, by many instances of men who have been taxed, though not represented in this Kingdom. If you assert it under the claim of equitable consideration, we must also refuse you; because you are bound to support that state which protects you; because other Nations extend their Revenues as they extend their Dominions; because the taxes imposed upon you were to have been applied within your own Provinces, and for your own safeties, and not for ours; and because your abilities even to share our burthens are un questionable, seeing that when eight millions of us pay ten millions of taxes, which amounts to twenty-five Shillings on each person, three millions of you pay only seventy-five thousand Pounds, or six Pence on each person; and this in a country where a labouring man gets three times the wages that he does in England, and yet may live on half the expense. When you tell us you are unable to pay taxes, pardon us for once in this address, if we tell you that we do not believe you. But if you appeal to the rights of human nature, and the great interests of society, we bow to those your sacred protectors. We can find no line between the use and abuse of taxing you without the consent of your own Assemblies. We revere the Prince on the Throne, and know our liberties to be safe in his hands; but we cannot be certain of a success royal virtue in all ages to come; and we can anticipate occasions when a Prince may, even by means of Parliament, venture to do things which he would not have ventured upon by himself; as Tiberius by his Senates did what Nero dared not to do by his Guards. In such a case, though Charters, practice, Statutes, and even equitable consideration, warrant us to retain the exercise of the power of taxation over you, we desire to throw it from us, as unworthy of you to be subject to, and of us to possess: We will not degrade you, because in your exaltation our own is involved; we desire only to be secured that you will yourselves make provision for your own safety and. defence. If this has not been done sooner, the fault was your own You connected your claim of not being taxed with so many other claims, that it became impossible for us to make The concession which we wished, from the danger of its being made a precedent for extorting other concessions, to which we could not yield without doing a mischief even to those who claimed them.

It has been the fortune, perhaps the peculiar one of Britain, that from apparent mischiefs, real good has arisen; and convulsions, terrifying at first, have only paved the way for preventing their return. the late differences, it is the fault of us both if we do not derive future agreement. That agreement is best to be insured by some great act of state, which, on the principles of mutual dependence, shall form a system of common interest and happiness, and remove, as far as human wisdom can look forward ward, the probability of future differences. Whether your Assemblies shall, in a constitutional way, make the first advance to Parliament to effectuate that measure, or Parliament shall make the first advance to you, by sending a Parliamentary Commission to America, is immaterial; first honour will belong to the party which shall first scorn punctilio in so noble a cause.

When the other subjects of dispute, unconnected with that of taxation, come to be canvassed by those who shall be authorized to give and receive suggestions for removing them, they will find, perhaps with surprise, of how little consequence the disputed points are, and how easy to be adjusted. Of these there seem to be chiefly three. The first of them arises from the restraints laid by the regulations of Parliament upon your trade and manufacture for the advantage of ours. But are we not laid under similar restraints in these respects, for the advantage of yours? For you we submit to monopolies; for you lay restraints on our trade; for you we are taxed; and for you impose similar hardships upon other parts of our Dominions. We shall only select a few instances out of many: The landed man is prohibited from raising Tobacco at home, and the Merchant disabled to import it with advantage from abroad, in order to give a monopoly of the commodity to you, and at their expense for the: one could raise and the other import Tobacco, at a much cheaper price than they get it from