not in their
separation. This is of itself decisive of the whole question.

But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers of
sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as one people,
but they were, so far as a people at all, one people even before
independence. The colonies were all erected and endowed with their
rights and powers by one and the same national authority, and the
colonists were subjects of one and the same national sovereign. Mr.
Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our prominent statesmen maintains
the unity of the colonial people, adds indeed to their subjection to
the same sovereign authority, community of origin, of language,
manners, customs, and law. All these, except the last, or common law,
may exist without national unity in the modern political sense of the
term nation. The English common law was recognized by the colonial
courts, and in force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial
legislation, but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in
English jurisprudence. The colonists were under the Common Law,
because they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
This proves that they were really one people with the English people,
though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and not a separate
people having nothing politically in common with them but in the
accident of having the same royal person for their king. The union
with the mother country was national, not personal, as was the union
existing between England and Hanover, or that still existing between
the empire of Austria, formerly Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary;
and hence the British parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right
to tax the colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in
all cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation laws.
The people of the several colonies being really one people before
independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, must be so
still, unless they have since, by some valid act, divided themselves or
been divided into separate and independent states.

The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The king
is dead! Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never in
abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed in
another. The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with
independence, and the