g manifestly
impossible for that consent to be "constitutionally had in Parliament."

It was commonly thought in America that Mr. Adams, although not a judge,
had a singular gift for constitutional interpretation. Far-sighted men
could nevertheless believe that a powerful party in England, inspired by
inveterate hatred of America and irretrievably bent upon her ruin, would
pronounce all his careful distinctions ridiculous and would still reply
to every argument by the mere assertion, as a fact behind which one
could not go, that Parliament had always had and must therefore still
have full power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. If Britain
would not budge from this position, Americans would soon be confronted
with the alternative of admitting Parliament to have full power or
denying it to have any.

With that sharp-set alternative in prospect, it would be well to keep in
mind the fact that arguments lost carrying power in proportion to their
subtlety; and in the opinion of so good a judge as Benjamin Franklin the
reasoning of Mr. Adams and Mr. Dickinson was perhaps not free from this
grave disadvantage.

"I am not yet master [he was free to confess] of the idea
these... writers have of the relation between Britain and her colonies.
I know not what the Boston people mean by the "subordination" they
acknowledge in their Assembly to Parliament, while they deny its power
to make laws for them, nor what bounds the Farmer sets to the power he
acknowledges in Parliament to "regulate the trade of the colonies," it
being difficult to draw lines between duties for regulation and those
for revenue; and, if the Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me
that establishing such a principle of distinction will amount to little.
The more I have thought and read on the subject, the more I find myself
confirmed in opinion, that no middle ground can be well maintained, I
mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of
either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make ALL LAWS
for us, or that it has a power to make NO LAWS for us; and I think the
arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty, than those for the
former."

The good Doctor had apparently read and thought a great deal about the
matter since the day when Mr. Grenville had called him in to learn if
there were good objections to be urged against the Stamp Act.

Practical men were meanwhile willing to allow the argument to