ight a reception that I do not think myself obliged to dwell a great
while upon it. It is nothing but a little sally of anger, like the
frowardness of peevish children, who, when they cannot get all they
would have, are resolved to take nothing.

The first of these plans--to change the spirit, as inconvenient, by
removing the causes--I think is the most like a systematic proceeding.
It is radical in its principle; but it is attended with great
difficulties: some of them little short, as I conceive, of
impossibilities. This will appear by examining into the plans which have
been proposed.

As the growing population of the colonies is evidently one cause of
their resistance, it was last session mentioned in both Houses, by men
of weight, and received not without applause, that, in order to check
this evil, it would be proper for the crown to make no further grants of
land. But to this scheme there are two objections. The first, that there
is already so much unsettled land in private hands as to afford room for
an immense future population, although the crown not only withheld its
grants, but annihilated its soil. If this be the case, then the only
effect of this avarice of desolation, this hoarding of a royal
wilderness, would be to raise the value of the possessions in the hands
of the great private monopolists, without any adequate check to the
growing and alarming mischief of population.

But if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The
people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in
many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these
deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on
their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to another.
Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached
to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian
mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one
vast, rich, level meadow: a square of five hundred miles. Over this
they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change
their manners with the habits of their life; would soon forget a
government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English
Tartars, and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and
irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your
counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves
that adhered to t