the rural populace, will no longer present
resistance that is formidable to the innovations which those who hold
extreme views are forever exhorting us to embrace; and the result may well
be that the disintegration of this staying and stabilizing element in our
citizenship--one that retards and mollifies if it does not inhibit
change--will produce consequences in its train which may be as dire as
they are difficult to foretell.

_Appendix_ 2

CAUSES FOR THE AMERICAN SPIRIT OF LIBERTY
(From the _Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies_)
By EDMUND BURKE

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating
feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is
always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and
untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by
force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage
worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English
Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a
great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of
their minds and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be
amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.

First, the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England,
Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her
freedom. The Colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character
was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment
they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to
liherty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English
principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be
found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has
formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the
criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know, Sir, that the great
contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly
upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient
commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates; or
on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of
money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On
this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been
exercised; the greatest spirits have a