ohn Locke had used it with good effect in
defense of the English revolution in the seventeenth century. American
leaders, familiar with the writings of Locke, also took up his thesis in
the hour of their distress. They openly declared that their rights did
not rest after all upon the English constitution or a charter from the
crown. "Old Magna Carta was not the beginning of all things," retorted
Otis when the constitutional argument failed. "A time may come when
Parliament shall declare every American charter void, but the natural,
inherent, and inseparable rights of the colonists as men and as citizens
would remain and whatever became of charters can never be abolished
until the general conflagration." Of the same opinion was the young and
impetuous Alexander Hamilton. "The sacred rights of mankind," he
exclaimed, "are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty
records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human
destiny by the hand of divinity itself, and can never be erased or
obscured by mortal power."

Firm as the American leaders were in the statement and defense of their
rights, there is every reason for believing that in the beginning they
hoped to confine the conflict to the realm of opinion. They constantly
avowed that they were loyal to the king when protesting in the strongest
language against his policies. Even Otis, regarded by the loyalists as a
firebrand, was in fact attempting to avert revolution by winning
concessions from England. "I argue this cause with the greater
pleasure," he solemnly urged in his speech against the writs of
assistance, "as it is in favor of British liberty ... and as it is in
opposition to a kind of power, the exercise of which in former periods
cost one king of England his head and another his throne."

=Burke Offers the Doctrine of Conciliation.=--The flooding tide of
American sentiment was correctly measured by one Englishman at least,
Edmund Burke, who quickly saw that attempts to restrain the rise of
American democracy were efforts to reverse the processes of nature. He
saw how fixed and rooted in the nature of things was the American
spirit--how inevitable, how irresistible. He warned his countrymen that
there were three ways of handling the delicate situation--and only
three. One was to remove the cause of friction by changing the spirit of
the colonists--an utter impossibility because that spirit was grounded
in the essential circumstances