hold together the great contexture of the mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of 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. 138. 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.

139. 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 proceedings 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.

140. In full confidence of this unalterable truth, I now-quod felix faustumque sit!-lay the first stone of 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 upwards 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.

IMPORTANT COLLATERAL READINGS

FROM THE SPEECHES OF EDMUND BURKE, WILLIAM PITT, AND CHARLES JAMES FOX; FROM THE HISTORIANS TREVELYAN AND LECKY; AND FROM THE PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, 1775-1776

HOW THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS

REGARDED IN ENGLAND

FROM G. O. TREVELYAN'S AMERICAN REVOLUTION It must never be forgotten that many Englishmen from the first-and in the end a decided, and indeed a very large, majority among them-regarded the contest which was being fought out in America not as a foreign war, but as a civil war in which English liberty was at stake. They held that a policy had been deliberately initiated, and during half a generation had been resolutely pursued, of which the avowed object was to make the Royal power dominant in the State; and the historians in highest repute, who since have treated of those times, unreservedly maintain the same view. That policy had now1 prevailed; and Personal Government, from a mischievous theory, had grown into a portentous reality. The victory of the Crown had been preceded by an epoch of continuous and bitter strife, every stage in which was marked by deplorable incidents. The publication through the press of opinions obnoxious to the Court had been punished with unsparing severity. The right of constituents to elect a person of their choice had been denied in words, and repeatedly violated in practice. The benches of the Lords and the Commons swarmed with an ever increasing band of placemen and pensioners subsidized by 'In the spring of 1777.

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the King; and these gentlemen well knew the work which the paymaster expected of them. Their vocation was to harass any minister who conceived that he owed a duty to the people as well as to the Sovereign; and to betray and ruin him if he proved incorrigible in his notions of patriotism. The most famous English statesmen-all, it is not too much to say, who are now remembered with pride by Englishmen of every party -were shut out from the opportunity, and even from the hope, of office; and our national qualities of manliness and independence had come to be a standing disqualification for employment in the nation's service. At last the Cabinet had picked a quarrel with the colonies over the very same question which convulsed England in the days of Strafford and the shipmoney. In order to vindicate the doctrine that taxation might be imposed without representation, the servants of the Crown, or rather its bondsmen (for the Prime Minister, and the most respectable of his colleagues, were in this matter acting under compulsion, and against their consciences), had undertaken to coerce the communities in America with fire and sword, and to visit individuals with the extreme penalties of rebellion. It followed, as a natural and certain consequence, that the party, which resented the encroachments of the Crown at home, sincerely and universally entertained a belief which influenced their whole view of the colonial controversy. That belief had been placed on record, in quiet but expressive language, by a nobleman who, in his honored age, lived among us as the last of the old Whigs. Lord Albe