overnment, by urging subtle
deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the
unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach
them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When
you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that
sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they
take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be
argued into slavery. Sir, let the gentlemen on the other side call forth
all their ability; let the best of them get up and tell me what one
character of liberty the Americans have, and what one brand of slavery
they are free from, if they are bound in their property and industry by
all the restraints you can imagine on commerce, and at the same time are
made pack-horses of every tax you choose to impose, without the least
share in granting them. When they bear the burdens of unlimited
monopoly, will you bring them to bear the burdens of unlimited revenue
too? The Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery: that it
is _legal_ slavery will be no compensation either to his feelings or his
understanding.

A noble lord,[14] who spoke some time ago, is full of the fire of
ingenuous youth; and when he has modelled the ideas of a lively
imagination by further experience, he will be an ornament to his country
in either House. He has said that the Americans are our children, and
how can they revolt against their parent? He says, that, if they are not
free in their present state, England is not free; because Manchester,
and other considerable places, are not represented. So, then, because
some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no
representative at all. They are "our children"; but when children ask
for bread, we are not to give a stone. Is it because the natural
resistance of things, and the various mutations of time, hinders our
government, or any scheme of government, from being any more than a sort
of approximation to the right, is it therefore that the colonies are to
recede from it infinitely? When this child of ours wishes to assimilate
to its parent, and to reflect with a true filial resemblance the
beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the
shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for
their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of
slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve