they want rights and immunities from you, that you call it mastery and dominion? So that they may be beggared by taxes in return for being protected; and executed as rebels if they prefer independence? May they not Say, when you complain of your taxes, that you could not pay those taxes if it were not for your commerce; and that a great and beneficial part of your commerce is your monopoly of American traffick? If therefore your monopoly of American traffick supplies a good part of those taxes, is it just to say that America does not contribute; or that she is not entitled to protection from any part of them? May she not also assert, that she is not the authoress of that debt with which you charge her? That the wars of King William and Queen Anne began it; that venal and unmanly counsels continued it; and that in the last war it was the Germanick and not the American Continent, from which it received its final accumulation. That all these measures were the product of English counsels, which were approved by the British Parliament, but over which the Colonies had no influence? That if the last war began about American boundaries, it was only because America is a British territory, and that it would equally have begun in whatever part of the Dominion the encroachment had been made? And if you will have America to be particularly concerned in the commencement of that war, may she not be bold to say that it was the conquests in America which your Colonists helped to make, and the cessions in America which they did not help to make, that accomplished the peace? Has she not reason to bid you look forward, and to tell you that, bending under that national debt, the Continent of Europe is not a scene on which you can act; and that it is by the American Continent only that the balance of Europe can be any longer in your hands? That by your great superiority of numbers there, you command both the Americas, command Spain and Portugal, influence Frame and other Powers of Europe, and that therefore instead of checking their increase by a jealous: and hostile policy, you ought to encourage it by every just and generous institution: that instead of exasperating them: by system, you should bind them to you by every demonstration of liberal attachment; and that you should leave them to conduct themselves to prosperity, without the alarming interposition of imperial authority, except where it is bona fide essential to preserve Great Britain at the head of an unite Empire? And as taxing the Colonies in the British Parliament or making them tax themselves by compulsory requisition from hence, inconsistent with all the rights of British property; and as it is evident, from your own past experience, that such a power is not necessary to the union of your Empire, but probably inconsistent with it; have they not reason to hope that you will renounce the idea with a manly decision, and not hold over their heads, in terrorem, a claim which even arbitrary countries do not exercise over their Colonies, the establishments of which are maintained at the expense of the parent state, without raising in them any conception that their Colonies are therefore useless, or that their Empire is in danger of being dissolved?

Surely no man can doubt but that system of Colony Government is best by which yon will derive the greatest benefit from your Colonies, with the least disquietude and discomfort to them and to yourselves. You will not let them go at large into Manufactures or Commerce. What follows? That they never can be opulent states, and not being so, that they never can be productive of any considerable Revenue. Do not endeavour to unite incompatibilities. You have made your choice, and you have made a wise one. You have chosen the greater object in preference to the less. You have chosen copious returns of trade, rather than scanty resources of tribute. It would be absurd now to shake and to reverse your system, for the purpose of going back to what you were right in originally relinquishing; and right too not only because it is in itself of more value, but because you can get much in this way without disgusting your Colonists, whereas you could get but little in the other with their total alienation; and that for this plain reason, that men can better bear to be deprived of many means of acquisition, than to lose all security in what they already possess, For men can be Happy without wealth, but they cannot be happy with nothing. It was right also, because if your title to taxation was ever so clear, it is equally clear that you ought not to use it-witness the Stamp Act; a law particularly calculated to execute itself, digested by an acknowledged financier, and prepared for by him as a great experiment, with much circumspection, and through a long period of time; and yet, take the whole system, and you find a thousand errours in it, and inaptitudes to the place for which it was designed. What, then, would it be reasonable to expect from such a power in the hands of ordinary financiers, and in the common course of business, in which expedition and round numbers, as it were, are preferred to accuracy or justice? What but eternal blunders, eternal miscarriages, and eternal feuds? What would be the consequence? You would hazard all your American Commerce, and all your American Empire, for the shadow of Revenue. Without a large Army you could levy nothing. With a large Army the expense would overbalance the receipts. If that Army did not reside, all would be confusion the moment it departed; if it did reside, how could its ranks be kept full? Or how could it be prevented from becoming American? And if all these difficulties were removed, how could such a system be reconciled to the principle of your Empire, which is free and commercial, and, which cannot be either of these without being both? Rome, however, it may be said, governed her Provinces by Armies. Be it so. But her Empire was military, not commercial. War was to her, in some measure, what peace is to us. It fanned the principle of her Government. Armies too were to Rome what Navies are to Great Britain. Yet what was the consequence of this measure there? All manner of injustice and rapine spread through the Provinces, under the sanction of the Roman banner. Some of the Dependencies were ruined more quietly; others revoked. Larger Armies were called for. The ruin of some Provinces, and the mighty Armies sustained in others, exhausted the Empire: The distant Legions became tumultuary. One Province was employed against its neighbour. As one Army was quieted, another mutinied. The Empire was tossed from hand to hand, and the Roman Government, once so famous, became a theatre of military ravage; full of contending Emperours and conflicting Legions. The same tumults would close the scene with us, and the Empire would be dismembered by the very arms that were intended to unite it; for nothing that is unnatural can last. There would be this difference, however, that this measure might have seemed at first to be congenial, and even auxiliary to the principle of the Roman state; but in out Government it would be madness from the beginning. What follows? That if for ten thousand reasons you cannot govern by the sword, you have but one thing left, and that is, to govern by justice; and if this proposition revolts yon, it is clear that you are not in a temper to govern.

That this system will dismember the Empire, is one of those solemn absurdities which some men affect to believe, for the purpose of imposing upon others. Has your hitherto leaving them to tax, and in general to regulate themselves, overturned your Empire? No; it has made it. Has Ireland, having had a Parliament for every purpose of legislation for six hundred years, made her independent or undutiful? You acknowledge the contrary. Indeed, how is it possible anything of this sort should happen? The British Parliament declares who shall be King for the whole Empire; and without the assent of that King, no law can pass in any of the Dependencies. Will that King dare to give, or will his Ministers dare advise him to give the royal assent to any law that will dismember the Empire? Is it credible to suppose that he would forfeit the crown of the whole Empire, to gratify or to conspire with a part of it, which he must lose, together with that crown? It is nonsense to suppose it. No law, therefore, can pass in any Dependency, over which you have not a negative in effect, though not in form. Is this nothing? The power of peace and war, and the sword of the Empire, resides with Great Britain. Your friends and enemies are of course the friends and enemies of the whole Dominion. Is this nothing? You raise men for your Fleets and Armies throughout the whole. Is this nothing? The worst that can happen is that you may sometimes fail in getting money from them also. This too you will get in a reasonable degree, and with reasonable attention to them. Neither is all that they can ever con-