March
22, 1775
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted
as ours is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble
the flights of the highest genius, and obtain pardon for the efforts
of the meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these
thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived, at length,
some confidence from what in other circumstances usually produces
timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance.
For, judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded
myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because
it had nothing but its reason to recommend it.
The
proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not
peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless
negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented
from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend
on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the
precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government.
It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary
haunts.
Let
the colonies always keep 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.
But let it be once understood that your government may be one
thing and their privileges another, that these two things may
exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion
is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution.
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 towards
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
in 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. This is the true Act of Navigation, which binds
to you the commerce of the -colonies, and through them secures
to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of
freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and
must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain
so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds,
your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances,
are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream
that 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 down to the minutest member.
Is
it not the same virtue which does every thing for us here in England?
Do you imagine, then, that-it is the Land-Tax Act which raises
your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply,
which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which
inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely, no! It is
the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government,
from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious
institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses
into both that liberal obedience without which your army would
be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
All
this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the
profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have
no place among us: 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. But to men truly initiated
and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which
in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned have no substantial
existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity
in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire
and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation,
and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and
ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on
America with the old warning of the Church, Sursum corda! We ought
to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the
order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity
of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness
into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the
only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting
the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us
get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English
privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone
will make it all it can be.
Part
of These United Colonies: The American
War of Independence Exhibit |
