The question with me is, not whether you
have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I _may_
do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Is a
politic act the worse for being a generous one? Is no concession proper,
but that which is made from your want of right to keep what you grant?
Or does it lessen the grace or dignity of relaxing in the exercise of an
odious claim, because you have your evidence-room full of titles, and
your magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them? What signify all those
titles and all those arms? Of what avail are they, when the reason of
the thing tells me that the assertion of my title is the loss of my
suit, and that I could do nothing but wound myself by the use of my own
weapons?

Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up
the concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity
of operations, that, if I were sure the colonists had, at their leaving
this country, sealed a regular compact of servitude, that they had
solemnly abjured all the rights of citizens, that they had made a vow to
renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to all
generations, yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the temper I
found universally prevalent in my own day, and to govern two million of
men, impatient of servitude, on the principles of freedom. I am not
determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity: and the general
character and situation of a people must determine what sort of
government is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or ought to
determine.

My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of
right or grant as matter of favor, is, _to admit the people of our
colonies into an interest in the Constitution_, and, by recording that
admission in the journals of Parliament, to give them as strong an
assurance as the nature of the thing will admit that we mean forever to
adhere to that solemn declaration of systematic indulgence.

Some years ago, the repeal of a revenue act, upon its understood
principle, might have served to show that we intended an unconditional
abatement of the exercise of a taxing power. Such a measure was then
sufficient to remove all suspicion and to give perfect content. But
unfortunate events since that time may make something further
necessary,--and not more nece