xtemporaneous debate, were not framing
their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little
have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions
nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to
history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions
often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the
people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist of
a future generation, as evidence that the subjects of the Khedive and
those of the King of Dahomey were but "one people," or that the
Peruvians and the Patagonians belonged to the same political community.

Mr. Everett, it is true, quotes two expressions of the Continental
Congress to sustain his remarkable proposition that the colonies were "a
people." One of these is found in a letter addressed by the Congress to
General Gage in October, 1774, remonstrating against the erection of
fortifications in Boston, in which they say, "We entreat your Excellency
to consider what a tendency this conduct must have to irritate and force
_a free people_, hitherto well disposed to peaceable measures, into
hostilities." From this expression Mr. Everett argues that the Congress
considered themselves the representatives of "a people." But, by
reference to the proceedings of the Congress, he might readily have
ascertained that the letter to General Gage was written in behalf of
"_the town of Boston and Province of Massachusetts Bay_," the people of
which were "considered by all America as suffering in the common cause
for their noble and spirited opposition to oppressive acts of
Parliament." The avowed object was "to entreat his Excellency, from the
assurance we have of the peaceable disposition of _the inhabitants of
the town of Boston and of the Province of Massachusetts Bay_, to
discontinue his fortifications."[37] These were the "people" referred to
by the Congress; and the children of the Pilgrims, who occupied at that
period the town of Boston and Province of Massachusetts Bay, would have
been not a little astonished to be reckoned as "one people," in any
other respect than that of the "common cause," with the Roman Catholics
of Maryland, the Episcopalians of Virginia, the Quakers of Pennsylvania,
or the Baptists of Rhode Island.

The other citation of Mr. Everett is from the first sentence of the
Declaration of Independence: "When in the course of human events it
becomes