nd the Carolinas they have a vast
multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world,
those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.
Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and
privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a
common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with
much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude;
liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and
liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this
sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot
alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the Southern
Colonies are much more strongly, and with an higher and more stubborn
spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. Such were all the
ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days
were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves
themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domination combines with
the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our Colonies which
contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable
spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the
law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful;
and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the
deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do
read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told
by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts
of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to
the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing
them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of
Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out
this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states
that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law;
and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly
to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions. The
smartness of debate will say that this knowledge ought to teach them more
clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedien