shmen parted
from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they
would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had
imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not
to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very
circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into
being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances.
No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status
of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man
of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being
represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of
self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise
such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of
inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of
Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of
self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.
But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took
his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the
Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such
share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of
political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom
but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's
fellow-subjects.

[Sidenote: The theory of the colonists.]

The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of
such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national,
England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might
allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life
of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last
hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration
in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their
legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the
mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised
without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother
country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing
their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet
raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous
contribution to the wealth of Brita