g,
if not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete
submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of
things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable. A vast province has now
subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor,
for near a twelvemonth, without governor, without public council,
without judges, without executive magistrates. How long it will continue
in this state, or what may arise out of this unheard-of situation, how
can the wisest of us conjecture? Our late experience has taught us that
many of those fundamental principles formerly believed infallible are
either not of the importance they were imagined to be, or that we have
not at all adverted to some other far more important and far more
powerful principles which entirely overrule those we had considered as
omnipotent. I am much against any further experiments which tend to put
to the proof any more of these allowed opinions which contribute so much
to the public tranquillity. In effect, we suffer as much at home by
this loosening of all ties, and this concussion of all established
opinions, as we do abroad. For, in order to prove that the Americans
have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to
subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove
that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate
the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry
advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those
principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors
have shed their blood.

But, Sir, in wishing to put an end to pernicious experiments, I do not
mean to preclude the fullest inquiry. Far from it. Far from deciding on
a sudden or partial view, I would patiently go round and round the
subject, and survey it minutely in every possible aspect. Sir, if I were
capable of engaging you to an equal attention, I would state, that, as
far as I am capable of discerning, there are but three ways of
proceeding relative to this stubborn spirit which prevails in your
colonies and disturbs your government. These are,--to change that
spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the causes,--to prosecute it, as
criminal,--or to comply with it, as necessary. I would not be guilty of
an imperfect enumeration; I can think of but these three. Another has,
indeed, been started,--that of giving up the colonies; but it met so
sl