ich neither shooting nor
flogging could silence, if it did not convince--they hid their heads,
with ostrich-like fatuity, in the blinding sands of their own ignorance,
and declared there could be no danger, for _they_ could not discern it.

I have said that there were three great political questions which
occupied the attention of statesmen at that day. I shall briefly glance
at each, as they form a most important standpoint in our national
history, and are subjects of the first interest to Irishmen and to Irish
history; and as Burke's maiden speech in the House of Commons was made
in favour of conciliating America, I shall treat that question first.
The facts are brief and significant but by no means as thoroughly known
or as well considered as they should be, when we remember their
all-important results--results which as yet are by no means fully
developed.[563] The actual contest between the English nation and her
American colonies commenced soon after the accession of George III.;
but, as early as the middle of the eighteenth century, Thomas Pownal,
Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and
New Jersey came to England, and published a work on the administration
of the colonies. He seems even then to have had a clear view of the
whole case. There is an old proverb about the last grain of rice
breaking the back of the camel, but we must remember that the load was
made up of many preceding grains. The Stamp Act and Tea Duty were
unquestionably the last links of an attempted chain of slavery with
which England ventured to fetter the noblest of her colonies, but there
were many preceding links. Pownal's work affords evidence of the
existence of many. The crown, he said, _in theory_ considered the lands
and plantations of the colonists its own, and attempted a far greater
control over the personal liberty of the subject than it dared to claim
in England. The people, on the other hand, felt that they had by no
means forfeited the rights of Englishmen because they had left England;
and that, if they submitted to its laws, they should at least have some
share in making them. A series of petty collisions, which kept up a
state of constant irritation, prepared the way for the final
declaration, which, flung aside the bonds of allegiance, and freed the
people from the galling chains by which that allegiance was sought to be
maintained. A wise policy at home might have averted the fatal
disruption for