by the submission of the Parliament and
nation to men of theory rather than of practice; ideologists, as
Napoleon called them; doctrinaires, to use the modern expression; men
who, because Parliament had an abstract right of universal legislation,
regarded it as a full justification for insisting on its exercise,
without giving a thought to the feelings, or prejudices, or habits of
those who might be affected by their measures. Abstractedly considered,
Lord Chatham and Lord Camden were undoubtedly wrong in denying the power
of Parliament to tax the Colonies; but there was better judgment in
their counsels, though founded on false premises, than in those of
Grenville and Townsend, though theirs was the more correct view of the
constitutional power of legislation. The two peers were wrong in their
principle; the two Chancellors of the Exchequer were unwise in their
application of their principle; and the practical error was the more
disastrous one.

It is now generally admitted that the true statesman-like course toward
the Colonies was that adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues in
1765--to avoid weakening the supreme power of Parliament by any
disavowal of the right to tax but to avoid imperilling the sovereign
authority of the King by a novel exertion of it. As much of our common
English law is made up of precedent, so, in a still greater degree, are
our feelings and ideas of our rights and privileges regulated by
precedent. And we lost America because in 1764 and 1767 neither minister
nor Parliament took men's feelings and prejudices into account. The loss
of the United States, therefore, was a lesson not undeserved; and by our
statesmen since that day it has been taken in the right spirit of
profiting by its teaching as a guide to their own conduct. Since that
day the enterprise of our people has planted our flag in regions far
more distant, and has extended the dominion of our sovereign over
provinces far more extensive than those which we then lost. And on some
of the administrations of the present reign the duty has fallen of
framing schemes of government for those new acquisitions, as also for
some of those previously possessed. In how different a spirit from that
which actuated the early ministers of George III.[57] those to whom the
task was committed by Queen Victoria applied themselves to their task
may be seen in a maxim laid down by the present Lord Grey, when he
presided at the Colonial Office (1846