them for their
freedom?

If this be the case, ask yourselves this question: Will they be content
in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences. Reflect
how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and
think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but
discontent, disorder, disobedience: and such is the state of America,
that, after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just
where you begun,--that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to
---- My voice fails me: my inclination, indeed, carries me no further;
all is confusion beyond it.

Well, Sir, I have recovered a little, and before I sit down I must say
something to another point with which gentlemen urge us. What is to
become of the Declaratory Act, asserting the entireness of British
legislative authority, if we abandon the practice of taxation?

For my part, I look upon the rights stated in that act exactly in the
manner in which I viewed them on its very first proposition, and which I
have often taken the liberty, with great humility, to lay before you. I
look, I say, on the imperial rights of Great Britain, and the privileges
which the colonists ought to enjoy under these rights, to be just the
most reconcilable things in the world. The Parliament of Great Britain
sits at the head of her extensive empire in two capacities. One as the
local legislature of this island, providing for all things at home,
immediately, and by no other instrument than the executive power. The
other, and I think her nobler capacity, is what I call her _imperial
character_; in which, as from the throne of heaven, she superintends all
the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all
without annihilating any. As all these provincial legislatures are only
cooerdinate to each other, they ought all to be subordinate to her; else
they can neither preserve mutual peace, nor hope for mutual justice, nor
effectually afford mutual assistance. It is necessary to coerce the
negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and deficient,
by the overruling plenitude of her power. She is never to intrude into
the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the common ends of
their institution. But in order to enable Parliament to answer all these
ends of provident and beneficent superintendence, her powers must be
boundless. The gentlemen who think the powers of Parliament limited may
please themsel