of heaven.
Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain
declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious
doctrines of the necessity of submission will be found equally
impotent to convince or enslave your fellow-subjects in America."

The most significant instance of the action of America on Europe is
Edmund Burke. We think of him as a man who, in early life, rejected
all generalities and abstract propositions, and who became the most
strenuous and violent of conservatives. But there is an interval when,
as the quarrel with the Colonies went on, Burke was as revolutionary
as Washington. The inconsistency is not as flagrant as it seems. He
had been brought forward by the party of measured propriety and
imperative moderation, of compromise and unfinished thought, who
claimed the right of taxing, but refused to employ it. When he urged
the differences in every situation and every problem, and shrank from
the common denominator and the underlying principle, he fell into step
with his friends. As an Irishman, who had married into an Irish
Catholic family, it was desirable that he should adopt no theories in
America which would unsettle Ireland. He had learnt to teach
government by party as an almost sacred dogma, and party forbids
revolt as a breach of the laws of the game. His scruples and his
protests, and his defiance of theory, were the policy and the
precaution of a man conscious of restraints, and not entirely free in
the exertion of powers that lifted him far above his tamer
surroundings. As the strife sharpened and the Americans made way,
Burke was carried along, and developed views which he never utterly
abandoned, but which are difficult to reconcile with much that he
wrote when the Revolution had spread to France.

In his address to the Colonists he says: "We do not know how to
qualify millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an
admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness
and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly
revere the principles on which you act. We had much rather see you
totally independent of this crown and kingdom, than joined to it by so
unnatural a conjunction as that of freedom and servitude. We view the
establishment of the English Colonies on principles of liberty, as
that which is to render this kingdom venerable to future ages. In
comparison of this, we regard all the victories and conqu