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renders her invincible. The Americans are now united and cemented by the strongest ties. They are allied in the common defence of every thing most dear to them. They are struggling in support of their liberties and properties, and the most sacred rights of mankind. Thus associated by the strongest mutual engagements, and aided by their mutual strength, aided by the justice of their cause, I must assert and repeat, my lords, that your efforts against them must be without success, and your war impracticable.

Ex. XXXIII.—THE REVENUE QUESTION.

Speech in Parliament, March 22, 1775.

EDMUND BURKE.

I, FOR One, protest against compounding our demands; I declare against compounding, for a poor limited sum, the immense, ever-growing, eternal debt, which is due to generous government from protected freedom. And so may I speed in the great object I propose to you, as I think it would not only be an act of injustice, but would be the worst economy in the world, to compel the colonies to a sum certain, either in the way of ransom, or in the way of compulsory compact.

But to clear up my ideas on this subject; a revenue from America transmitted hither-do not delude yourselves, you can never receive it—no, not a shilling. We have experience, that from remote countries it is not to be expected. If, when you attempted to extract revenue from Bengal, you were obliged to return in loan what you had taken in imposition; what can you expect from North America? For certainly, if there ever was a country qualified to produce wealth, it is India; or an institution fit for the transmission, it is the East India company. America has none of these aptitudes. If America gives you taxable objects, on which you lay your duties here, and gives you, at the same time, a surplus, by a foreign sale of her commodities to pay the duties on these objects which you tax at home, she has performed her part in the British revenue. But with regard to her own internal establishment; she may, I doubt not she will, contribute in moderation. I say, in moderation; for she ought not to

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be permitted to exhaust herself. She ought to be reserved to a war, the weight of which, with the enemies we are likely to have, must be considerable in her quarter of the globe. Then she may serve you, and serve you essentially.

For that service, for all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire, my trust is in her interest in the British constitution. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. 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. 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 obedi

ence.

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. 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 that does everything 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, without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

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 that it can be.

Ex. XXXIV.-SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE IN NEW ENGLAND.

Speech in Parliament, March 22, 1775.

EDMUND BURKE.

As to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.

Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay, and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and

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romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, but iş only a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry.

Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perillous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of a watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

In the character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and intractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.

The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are, therefore, not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing.

Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of the election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and the most eloquent tongues have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.

They have taken infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that, in all monarchies, the people must in themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could exist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, their ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, is fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe, or might be endangered in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. The fact is, they did thus apply those arguments, and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.

Ex. XXXV.-LEXINGTON.*

April 19, 1775.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

SLOWLY the mist o'er the meadow was creeping,
Bright on the dewy buds glistened the sun,

When from his couch, while his children were sleeping,
Rose the bold rebel and shouldered his gun.
Waving her golden veil

Over the silent dale

Blithe looked the morning on cottage and spire;

*It having been found impossible to obtain sufficient Revolutionary poetry (of a suitable kind) to give variety to the selections, such as refers to wellknown events in our history, although written in more modern times, will be introduced in its appropriate chronological order.

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