led to grasp the difference
between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual
citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state
which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound
together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to
it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To
Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as
completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any
difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial
legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent.
What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not
strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but
corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have
been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of
the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading
company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will
of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were
granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their
legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as
completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its
franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in
matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial
Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above
all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was
borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted
its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to
acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very
nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.
No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament
over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as
absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law
Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this;
for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without
a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be
applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact
of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Engli