tribute, over and above the maintenance of their local establishments, worth a civil war. For as to any significant remittances of Revenue from America to Great Britain, it is too absurd to talk about. Add to all I have said above, what is indeed Revenue, and Infinitely more than Revenue: that Britain, as the head of a Naval and Commercial Empire, must be supreme in trade and commerce, naval and maritime regulation. Is this nothing? Or rather is it not every thing? Will you get nothing from your Colonies by such a system? I will be bold to say that you will get more than any Nation under the sun ever obtained from Colonies before. What follows from all this? That you are going at this very moment, at the expense of every species of injustice and cruelty, to contend with your countrymen for nothing, at the hazard of every thing. If this is common sense; go on with it.

You say it is strange that in this dispute Englishmen have become opponents to English honour and interest; that perhaps it never happened before that Justice found much opposition with interest on her side; and that the principles of the Congress, however wild, have united all the Provinces against the mother country, from New England to South Carolina. Are not these circumstances, I ask, much stronger presumptions against you, than in your behalf? For is impossible to conceive that a cause, in which no religious enthusiasm enters, which has nothing to appeal to but reason and justice, and against which the semblance of a national interest and honour is leagued, is it to be conceived that such a cause, if founded in fraud or falsehood, could have stood ten years agitation without detection? Or that if it were not built on the most solid truth, and upon the most commanding justice, that so many Provinces, with so many principles of discord to keep them asunder, would have united against a parent country so powerful, and to which the moment before they were so cordially united? And that such a combination in America should not produce union in Great. Britain, even if before there had been nothing but enmity, instead of leaving this matter as it has done, to be the leading and almost the only subject of controversy amongst us? And what can be more honourable to the character of this great and just Nation, than that no sophism of perverted talents like yours; no pretexts even of national interest or honour; nor all these, aided by the voice of Parliament itself, could warp the integrity of the publick mind, or blind it to those rights in their countrymen, which the people of this Kingdom, by such an unshaken adherence to them, have shewn they will not suffer to be torn from themselves.

You say that the Colonies of Britain differ from those of other Nations no otherwise than as the English Constitution differs from theirs. The American agrees with you, and says that is in freedom. But that not a modern device dressed up in deceitful words, but the solid freedom of the British Constitution, which cannot exist without a resident Legislature for dome stick regulation in general, and for taxation particularly furnished with Members constituted by the property of that country which they are to tax. He who goes voluntarily to America, you say, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe; for that as a man can be but in one place at once, he cannot have the advantage of multiplied residence. But first, our Colonists were not mere, voluntary emigrants. They went by the invitation of the state. A futile claim to an uncultivated territory was all you had. That you would have lost if you had not sent them to keep possession of it.—They went therefore, in the service of their country, and a hard service top, A barren or over-wooded soil was what you gave them. You owe your title to that soil, at this moment, to their occupancy; they owe the fruits of it to their labour, and they pay the monopoly of its trade to your superiour and parental relation. Men who stand in this situation are not lightly to be construed out of their privileges. They allow, by this change of place, that they lose their vote for a Representative in Britain, and they claim in lieu of it, though by no means an equivalent, a vote for Representative in America, They say it is an inseparable quality of property by the British Government, to constitute the members of the Legislature that are to tax that property; that as their property lies in America, it must constitute the members that are to tax America; but that it has no share in constituting the British House of Commons, and that therefore they are not to be taxed by that assembly.

You say that the Americans do not wish to send Representatives to the British Parliament, and I believe it. They see the difficulty, or rather impossibility of executing such an idea, and how unfairly, if it were possible, it is lively to be executed. They conclude, therefore; that they must be represented and taxed in America. But you conclude the reverse, that they ought to be taxed in England, and say that there is little difference, if any, between a man's being taxed by compulsion without representation, and being represented by compulsion in order to be taxed. This seems, how consistently I know not, to state this as the alternative to which the American is reduced; and the American confesses that your doctrine at the best, does not mend that condition. For he says that if you force him to receive, at the point of the sword, a fiction of his being virtually represented here, that he will then be exactly in the state you describe, viz: that of being represented by compulsion, in order to be taxed. And he admits that violence in the first instance, by taking his money by force without any law, would be less an insult to his understanding, and perhaps a less dangerous, because a more alarming violation of his property.

And though every part of your publication breathes nothing but the spirit of tyranny; yet there is one passage so audacious that it deserves to be distinguished. In your 24th page you have these words: "An English individual may, by the supreme authority, be deprived of liberty, and a Colony divested of its powers, for reasons of which that authority is the sole judge." If one individual or one Colony can be thus, deprived, so may all the Colonies together—so may every man In. the community; for I defy any man to shew where any limitation exists, if any such power be admitted. By this doctrine, the Parliament, for reasons of which it is the sole judge, that, is, without assigning any reason at all, may make every man in the British Empire a slave in one day: that is to say, a body of men, taken from amongst ourselves, in number not above a thousand, collected in one spot of the Empire, under the most sacred trusty for the serving of the whole, are entitled to do that which no power earth has a right to do, viz: to make slaves at one blow, and without saying wherefore, of Fourteen millions of fellow subjects, and of their posterity, to latest time, and throughout every quarter of the world. Is such language to be endured? Or can he be a friend to human nature who uses it?

With equal humanity, in your 60th page, you say, "If the Bostonians are condemned unheard, It is because there is no need of a trial. All trial is the investigation of something doubtful." Your ideas of legislation, we had before, and your judicial ideas are as intolerable. To say that a crime's being notorious, or asserted to be notorious, will justify condemnation unheard, is too insolent an imposition. Where is the Caligula who would not say that the guilt of the man, or of the Province that he wanted to destroy, was notorious. If the assertion of the tyrant will convert cruelty into justice, no tyrant will ever be cruel. But the law of England is so different from your sentiment, that it presumes every man to be innocent till his guilt is tried and established; that is, instead of condemning unheard, so long as any man is unheard, it acquits him.

Neither do you stop at barren tenets of tyranny, but endeavour to propagate them into act, and to stamp their image upon the measures of Government. You call aloud to the Crown to new-model; that is, to innovate Charters. Yet what is your doctrine with respect to Charters? It is that, if these emigrants had gone without ceremony to seek their fortunes in any district which was unoccupied, or which by arms, address, or labour, they had acquired, they would have been independent states. But that, by accepting these Charters, the Colonists put themselves under the protection of the state, and by necessary implication under its jurisdiction and authority. Thus you confess that if it were not for these Charters, they might have been independent; and yet, in other places, you say that it is to these Charters they owe that they are freemen. At one time you state these Charters as an invaluable, favour conferred upon them, and at another, as an inextricable chain by which they are bound. You state it as a compact, and