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true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce 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 Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire.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 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 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 place as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceeding on America with the old warning of the church, sursum corda! We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying but by promoting, the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.

In full confidence of this unalterable truth, I now, quod felix faustumque sit, lay the first stone in the temple of peace; and I move you,

That the colonies and plantations of Great Britain in North America, consisting of fourteen separate governments, and containing two millions and upward of free inhabitants, have not had the liberty and privilege of electing and sending any knights and burgesses, or others, to represent them in the high court of Parliament.

ON REJECTION OF

BONAPARTE'S

OVERTURES OF PEACE

BY

CHARLES JAMES FOX

CHARLES JAMES FOX

1749-1806

A man who enters Parliament at nineteen, after incurring debts by gambling and other dissipation to the amount of half a million of dollars in two years; who begins political life, at that boyish age, as a Tory, but adopts the principles of the Whigs, and becomes a leader of the party before he is thirty; who was born an aristocrat, with royal blood in his veins on the maternal side, and on that of his father, Lord Holland, inheriting a vast fortune; but who, owing to the soundness of his heart and the clearness of his brain, became a champion of popular rights, and the enemy and terror of his quondam friends; and who died at the age of fifty-seven with a world-wide reputation as a statesman, patriot, and friend of humanity; such a man as this would be sufficient, one might think, to be the adornment of an age. And yet Charles James Fox was but one of the incomparable galaxy of genius which blazed in the firmament of the latter part of the eighteenth century, and made the reign of one of the most stupid and narrow-minded kings that ever sat upon the throne of England the most brilliant epoch, with the exception of that of Elizabeth, that modern history records.

He was born in London in 1749; his mother being Lady Caroline Georgina, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond, who was a grandson of Charles II. He was schooled at Eton, and went to Oxford; but left without taking his degree. His home influences were unfavorable to the right development of his genius and character; and there is little doubt that he might have been a far greater and more useful man than he actually became, had he enjoyed the advantage of wise and strict training where he had the best right to expect it. But his father was a dissolute and cynical man of the world, who encouraged his son to embrace the vices, and surfeit himself with the pleasures of the town; giving him all the money he asked for, and enabling him to get credit for much more. The naturally pure and noble instincts of the boy at first revolted against the coarse and unprincipled self-indulgence which Lord Holland surrounded him with; but though his heart was good, it was hot, and his nature was but too prone to the pleasures of the senses and the excitements of a life of dissipation. On the other hand, we can hardly doubt that Fox gained by the circumstances of his birth, placing him as that did among the highest nobles of the land as their equal or superior. Had he been of plebeian origin, with his own way to make, some of the loftier and more generous traits of his character would have suffered; something of the headlong courage, the matchless audacity, with which he attacked his opponents, and denounced even the King himself-for what was a Guelph to a scion of the Stuarts?-in the cause of the people. Moreover, had he been humble by birth, he would naturally have aimed to lift himself to the nobility; but possessing at the outset every advantage that wealth and lineage could bestow, he had nothing further to see or care for in that direction, and

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