avert or postpone the hour of danger. It must arrive, my lords, unless these fatal acts are done away: it must arrive, in all its horrors; and then these boastful ministers, in spite of all their confidence and all their manoeuvres, shall be compelled to hide their heads. But it is not repealing this or that act of parliament; it is not repealing a piece of parchment, that can restore America to your bosom you must repeal her fears and resentments, and then you may hope for her love and gratitude. But now, insulted with an armed force, irritated with a hostile array before her eyes, her concessions, if you could force them, would be suspicious, and insecure. But it is more than evident that you cannot force them to your unworthy terms of submission: it is impossible: WE ourselves shall be forced ultimately to retract: let us retract while we can, not when we must. I repeat it, my lords, we shall one day be forced to undo these violent acts of oppression: they must be repealed; you will repeal them. I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them: I stake my reputation on it I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not repealed. Avoid then this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace, and to happiness. Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from superior power: it reconciles superiority of power with the feelings of man, and establishes solid confidence on the foundations of affection and gratitude. On the other hand, every danger and every hazard impend to deter you from perseverance in the present ruinous measures foreign war hanging over your heads by a slight and brittle thread-France and Spain watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors, with a vigilant eye to America and the temper of your colonies more than to their own concerns, be they what they may. To conclude, my lords, if the ministers thus persevere in misadvising and misleading the king, I will not say, that they can alienate the affections of his subjects from the crown; but I affirm, they will make the crown not worth his wearing. I will not say that the king is betrayed, but I will pronounce, that the kingdom is undone.

LORD CAMDEN ON SECONDING THE SAME.

King, Lords, and Commons, are grand and sounding names, but, King, Lords, and Commons may become tyrants as well as others. Tyranny in one or more is the same: it is as lawful to resist the tyranny of many, as of one: this has been a doctrine known and acted upon in this country for ages. When the fa mous Selden was asked, by what statute resistance to tyranny could be justified? his reply was: It is to be justified by the custon. of England, which is a part of the law of the land. I will affirm, my lords, not only as a statesman, politician, and philosopher, but as a common lawyer, that you have no right to tax America. No man, agreeably to the principles of natural or civil liberty, can be divested of any part of his property without his consent: and whenever oppression begins, resistance becomes lawful and right.

BURKE ON AMERICAN AFFAIRS-MARCH, 1775.

As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit, by which that enterprising employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale-fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay, and Davis's Straits; whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a

stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me. My rigor relents, I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

BURKE ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA.

A REVENUE from America transmitted hither-do not delude yourselves—you can never receive it—No, not a shilling. We have experience that from remote countries, it is not to be expected. If when you attempted to extract revenue from Bengal, you were obliged to return in loan what you had taken in impo-` sition; what can you expect from North America? for certainly, if ever there was a country qualified to produce wealth, it is India, or an institution fit for the transmission, it is the East India Company. America has none of these aptitudes. If America gives you taxable objects, on which you lay your duties here, and gives

you, at the same time, a surplus by a foreign sale of her commodities to pay the duties on these objects which you tax at home, she has performed her part to the British revenue. But with regard to her own internal establishments, she may, I doubt not she will, contribute in moderation. I say in moderation; for she ought not to be permitted to exhaust herself. She ought to be reserved to a war; the weight of which, with the enemies that we are most likely to have, must be considerable in her quarter of the globe. There she may serve you, and serve you essentially.

For that service, for all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire, my trust is in her interest in the British constitution. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties, which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will have power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once uuderstood, that your government may be one thing, and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation—the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navigation, which binds to you the com merce of the colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still pre

serve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion, that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the land tax act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply, which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! Surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be the directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America, with the old warning of the church,