the idea of their civil rights associated
with your Government; they will cling and grapple to you, and
no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their
allegiance....

As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority
of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple
consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and
sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces
toward you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will
have. The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect
will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is
a weed that grows on every soil. They may have it from Spain;
they may have it from Prussia; but until you become lost to
all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity,
freedom they can have from none but you.

This is the commodity of price, of which you have the
monopoly.... Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that
your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your
sufferances, ... your letters of office and your instructions
and your suspending clauses are the things that hold together
the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do
not make your Government. Dead instruments, passive tools as
they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives
all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the
English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass,
pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of
the empire, even to the minutest member.

And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of
Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its
supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written
one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain
themselves together! Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires
with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke's immortal scorn of such
formalists:

"A sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and
material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors
of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the
machine. To men truly initiated and rightly taught, those ruling and
master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned,
hav