hing equal to it, and all attempts to impose servitude upon such a
mighty continental nation must be vain."

"We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can,
not when we must. These violent Acts must be repealed; you will repeal
them; I pledge myself for it, I stake my reputation on it, that you will
in the end repeal them."

(Those violent Acts were repealed three years afterwards.)

When the Earl of Shelburne read the reply, written by Jefferson, of the
Virginia Legislature, to Lord North's proposition, his Lordship said:
"In my life, I was never more pleased with a State paper than with the
Assembly of Virginia's discussion of Lord North's proposition. It is
masterly. But what I fear is that the evil is irretrievable."

Among the statesmanlike productions of that period, the correspondence
of Franklin, the masterly letters of Dickenson, the letters and State
papers of Samuel and John Adams, Jay and Livingstone, and of many
others, exhibit a scholarly race of statesmen and writers of whom any
nation or age might be proud.

But it must not be forgotten that the education of every one of these
great men, and their training in public affairs, was under English
constitutional government, for which every one of them (except Samuel
Adams) expressed their unqualified admiration, and to which they avowed
their unswerving attachment to within twelve months of the declaration
of independence. Though the United States can boast of many
distinguished scholars and politicians and jurists, I believe American
democracy has never produced a generation of scholarly, able, and
stainless statesmen, such as those who had received the whole of their
mental, moral, and political training when America formed a part of the
British empire.

It is not surprising, indeed, that the major part (for they were not
unanimous) of so noble and patriotic a class of statesmen should, by the
wicked policy and cruel measures against them by the worst
administration of government that ever ruled England, be betrayed into
an act which they had so many years disavowed. Placing, as they rightly
did, in the foreground the civil and religious liberties of Englishmen
as the first ingredient of the elements of political greatness and
social progress, they became exasperated into the conviction that the
last and only effective means of maintaining those liberties was to
sever their connection with England altogether, and declare their