right to their liberties, we were every day endeavouring to subvert
the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the
value of freedom itself. The material strength of the Government, and
its moral strength alike, would have been reinforced by the defeat of
the colonists, to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even
jeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too. As
events actually fell out, the ferocious administration of the law
in the last five or six years of the eighteenth century was the
retribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of the
English community had watched the measures of the Government against
their fellow-Englishmen in America.

[Footnote 1: _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_.]

It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through the
successive stages of parliamentary action in the American war. He
always defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was repealed,
and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother
country was preserved in a Declaratory Act. When the project of taxing
the colonies was revived, and relations with them were becoming
strained and dangerous, Burke came forward with a plan for leaving the
General Assemblies of the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead
of giving and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid
in the colonies. Needless to say that it was rejected, and perhaps it
was not feasible. Henceforth Burke could only watch in impotence the
blunders of Government, and the disasters that befell the national
arms. But his protests against the war will last as long as our
literature.

Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqualified
and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentous
struggle:--the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); the
Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the Letter
to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Together they hardly exceed the
compass of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. It
is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual in
our literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the study
of public affairs, whether for knowledge or for practice. They are an
example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a
theorist or an actor, of great political