ion of men here, rather than they
should be driven to seek for protection against the fury of foreign
mercenaries and the waste of savages in the arms of France.

When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great
danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of
the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide
in its own favor. It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational
cause of fear, if the inferior body can be made to believe that the
party inclination or political views of several in the principal state
will induce them in some degree to counteract this blind and tyrannical
partiality. There is no danger that any one acquiring consideration or
power in the presiding state should carry this leaning to the inferior
too far. The fault of human nature is not of that sort. Power, in
whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.
But one great advantage to the support of authority attends such an
amicable and protecting connection: that those who have conferred favors
obtain influence, and from the foresight of future events can persuade
men who have received obligations sometimes to return them. Thus, by the
mediation of those healing principles, (call them good or evil,)
troublesome discussions are brought to some sort of adjustment, and
every hot controversy is not a civil war.

But, if the colonies (to bring the general matter home to us) could see
that in Great Britain the mass of the people is melted into its
government, and that every dispute with the ministry must of necessity
be always a quarrel with the nation, they can stand no longer in the
equal and friendly relation of fellow-citizens to the subjects of this
kingdom. Humble as this relation may appear to some, when it is once
broken, a strong tie is dissolved. Other sort of connections will be
sought. For there are very few in the world who will not prefer an
useful ally to an insolent master.

Such discord has been the effect of the unanimity into which so many
have of late been seduced or bullied, or into the appearance of which
they have sunk through mere despair. They have been told that their
dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. Men of
great presumption and little knowledge will hold a language which is
contradicted by the whole course of history. _General_ rebellions and
revolts of an whole people never were _encouraged_, now or at