upon a footing of equality with her own colonies,
which the law has hitherto supposed to
be subject and subordinate, it seems necessary,
upon the scheme of taxing them by parliamentary
requisition, that parliament should
have some means of rendering its requisitions
immediately effectual, in case the colony assemblies
should attempt to evade or reject
them; and what those means are, it is not
very easy to conceive, and it has not yet been
explained.
Should the parliament of Great Britain, at
the same time, be ever fully established in the
right of taxing the colonies, even independent
of the consent of their own assemblies, the
importance of those assemblies would, from
that moment, be at an end, and with it, that
of all the leading men of British America.
Men desire to have some share in the management
of public affairs, chiefly on account of
the importance which it gives them. Upon
the power which the greater part of the leading
men, the natural aristocracy of every country,
have of preserving or defending their respective
importance, depends the stability and
duration of every system of free government.
In the attacks which those leading men are continually
making upon the importance of one another,
and in the defence of their own, consists
the whole play of domestic faction and ambition.
The leading men of America, like those
of all other countries, desire to preserve their
own importance. They feel, or imagine, that if
their assemblies, which they are fond of calling
parliaments, and of considering as equal
in authority to the parliament of Great Britain,
should be so far degraded as to become
the humble ministers and executive officers
of that parliament, the greater part of their
own importance would be at an end. They
have rejected, therefore, the proposal of being
taxed by parliamentary requisition, and,
like other ambitious and high-spirited men,
have rather chosen to draw the sword in defence
of their own importance.
Towards the declension of the Roman republic,
the allies of Rome, who had borne
the principal burden of defending the state
and extending the empire, demanded to be
admitted to all the privileges of Roman citizens.
Upon being refused, the social war
broke out. During the course of that war,
Rome granted those privileges to the greater
part of them, one by one, and in proportion as
they detached themselves from the general
confederacy. The parliament of Great Britain
insists upon taxing the colonies; and they
refuse to be taxed by a parliament in which
they are not represented. If to each colony
which should detach itself from the general
confederacy, Great Britain should allow such
a number of representatives as suited the proportion
of what it contributed to the public
revenue of the empire, in consequence of its
being subjected to the same taxes, and in compensation
admitted to the same freedom of
trade with its fellow-subjects at home; the
number of its representatives to be augmented
as the proportion of its contribution might afterwards
augment; a new method of acquiring
importance, a new and more dazzling object
of ambition, would be presented to the
leading men of each colony. Instead of piddling
for the little prizes which are to be found
in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony
faction, they might then hope, from the
presumption which men naturally have in their
own ability and good fortune, to draw some
of the great prizes which sometimes come from
the wheel of the great state lottery of British
politics. Unless this or some other method is
fallen upon, and there seems to be none more
obvious than this, of preserving the importance
and of gratifying the ambition of the leading
men of America, it is not very probable that they
will ever voluntarily submit to us; and we
ought to consider, that the blood which must
be shed in forcing them to do so, is, every
drop of it, the blood either of those who are,
or of those whom we wish to have for our fellow-citizens.
They are very weak who flatter
themselves that, in the state to which things
have come, our colonies will be easily conquered
by force alone. The persons who now
govern the resolutions of what they call their
continental congress, feel in themselves at this
moment a degree of importance which, perhaps,
the greatest subjects in Europe scarce
feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attorneys,
they are become statesmen and legislators,
and are employed in contriving a new
form of government for an extensive empire,
which, they flatter themselves, will become,
and which, indeed, seems very likely to become,
one of the greatest and most formidable
that ever was in the world. Five hundred
different people, perhaps, who, in different
ways, act immediately under the continental
congress, and five hundred thousand, perhaps,
who act under those five hundred, all feel, in
the same manner, a proportionable rise in
their own importance. Almost every individual
of the governing party in America fills,
at present, in his own fancy, a station superior,
not only to what he had ever filled before,
but to what he had ever expected to fill;
and unless some new object of ambition is
presented either to him or to his leaders, if he
has the ordinary spirit of a man, he will die
in defence of that station.
It is a remark of the President Heynaut,
that we now read with pleasure the account
of many little transactions of the Ligue, which,
when they happened, were not, perhaps, considered
as very important pieces of news. But
every man then, says he, fancied himself of
some importance; and the innumerable memoirs
which have come down to us from those
times, were the greater part of them written
by people who took pleasure in recording and