ce has cost the race so dear, are discovered and
shown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that they are. Fox
once urged members of Parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliation
again and again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress
it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson which he
thought to be contained in it, that representation is the sovereign
remedy for every evil. This is by far the least important of its
lessons. It is great in many ways. It is greatest as a remonstrance
and an answer against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national
pride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest; and here it is
great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because they
expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults of heart and
temper, as well as of understanding, which move nations to haughty and
violent courses.

The great argument with those of the war party who pretended to a
political defence of their position, was the doctrine that the English
Government was sovereign in the colonies as at home; and in the notion
of sovereignty they found inherent the notion of an indefeasible
right to impose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of the
existence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they took to be
its natural property, they saw no step between the existence of an
abstract right and the propriety of enforcing it. We have seen an
instance of a similar mode of political thinking in our own lifetime.
During the great civil war between the northern and southern states of
the American Union, people in England convinced themselves--some
after careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances at
second-hand authorities--that the south had a right to secede. The
current of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to which the
United States owed their separate existence. Now the idea of a right
as a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in a state
of naked divorce from expediency and convenience, was one that Burke's
political judgment found preposterous and unendurable. He hated
the arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the English
assumptions over the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when
he found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanent
advantage which their victory would procure for the mother country
or for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a
victory; not by