he British Constitution, should be solved by
the arms of foreign mercenary soldiers.

It is not, Sir, from a want of the most inviolable duty to your Majesty,
not from a want of a partial and passionate regard to that part of your
empire in which we reside, and which we wish to be supreme, that we
have hitherto withstood all attempts to render the supremacy of one part
of your dominions inconsistent with the liberty and safety of all the
rest. The motives of our opposition are found in those very sentiments
which we are supposed to violate. For we are convinced beyond a doubt,
that a system of dependence which leaves no security to the people for
any part of their freedom in their own hands cannot be established in
any inferior member of the British empire, without consequentially
destroying the freedom of that very body in favor of whose boundless
pretensions such a scheme is adopted. We know and feel that arbitrary
power over distant regions is not within the competence, nor to be
exercised agreeably to the forms or consistently with the spirit, of
great popular assemblies. If such assemblies are called to a nominal
share in the exercise of such power, in order to screen, under general
participation, the guilt of desperate measures, it tends only the more
deeply to corrupt the deliberative character of those assemblies, in
training them to blind obedience, in habituating them to proceed upon
grounds of fact with which they can rarely be sufficiently acquainted,
and in rendering them executive instruments of designs the bottom of
which they cannot possibly fathom.

To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must be left to the
colonies. A military government is the only substitute for civil
liberty. That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly
ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part of
our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the
destruction of our freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to
a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English
people,--kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their
consent, and maintained by that exaction,--instruments in subverting,
without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected
forms of governments,--set free from, and therefore above, the ordinary
English tribunals of the country where they serve,--these men cannot so
transform themselves, merely by