o conceive them free; for who can be more a slave than
he that is driven, by force, from the comforts of life, is compelled to
leave his house to a casual comer, and, whatever he does, or wherever he
wanders, finds, every moment, some new testimony of his own subjection?
If choice of evil be freedom, the felon in the galleys has his option of
labour or of stripes. The Bostonian may quit his house to starve in the
fields; his dog may refuse to set, and smart under the lash, and they
may then congratulate each other upon the smiles of liberty, "profuse of
bliss, and pregnant with delight."

To treat such designs as serious, would be to think too contemptuously
of Bostonian understandings. The artifice, indeed, is not new: the
blusterer, who threatened in vain to destroy his opponent, has,
sometimes, obtained his end, by making it believed, that he would hang
himself.

But terrours and pity are not the only means by which the taxation of
the Americans is opposed. There are those, who profess to use them only
as auxiliaries to reason and justice; who tell us, that to tax the
colonies is usurpation and oppression, an invasion of natural and legal
rights, and a violation of those principles which support the
constitution of English government.

This question is of great importance. That the Americans are able to
bear taxation, is indubitable; that their refusal may be overruled, is
highly probable; but power is no sufficient evidence of truth. Let us
examine our own claim, and the objections of the recusants, with caution
proportioned to the event of the decision, which must convict one part
of robbery, or the other of rebellion.

A tax is a payment, exacted by authority, from part of the community,
for the benefit of the whole. From whom, and in what proportion such
payment shall be required, and to what uses it shall be applied, those
only are to judge to whom government is intrusted. In the British
dominions taxes are apportioned, levied, and appropriated by the states
assembled in parliament.

Of every empire all the subordinate communities are liable to taxation,
because they all share the benefits of government, and, therefore, ought
all to furnish their proportion of the expense.

This the Americans have never openly denied. That it is their duty to
pay the costs of their own safety, they seem to admit; nor do they
refuse their contribution to the exigencies, whatever they may be, of
the British empire; but they