ve
been made to order out of the imagination of Rousseau or Fenelon."

Had they known them better they would have liked them less; and in fact
ten years' "discussion of the points in controversy only served to put
farther asunder" men who reasoned from different premises and in a
different temper. Englishmen were generally content with the fact of
power registered in legal precedents; but Americans, profoundly
convinced that they deserved to be free, were ever concerned with its
moral justification. "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes
... on the cases of Manchester and ... Sheffield," cried James Otis. "If
these places are not represented, _they ought to be_." This _ought_ is
the fundamental premise of the entire colonial argument. "Shall we
Proteus-like perpetually change our ground, assume every moment some new
strange shape, to defend, to evade?" asks a Virginian in 1774. This was
precisely what could not be avoided. For the end determined the means.
If, therefore, the distinction between external and internal taxes was
untenable, it convinced the American, not that Parliament had a right to
tax the colonies, but only that it had no right to legislate for them.
And when Englishmen grounded the legislative rights of Parliament upon
the solid basis of positive law, the colonial patriot appealed with
solemn fervor to natural law and the abstract rights of man. Little
wonder that the more logical the American argument became the less
intelligible it appeared to most Englishmen, and what seemed at last the
very axioms of politics to the colonial radical struck the conservative
British mind as the sophistry of men bent on revolution.

If ten years' discussion convinced American patriots that they possessed
more rights than their philosophy had yet dreamed of, constant dwelling
on their condition developed a sensitiveness which registered oppression
where none had been felt before. What a profound influence had those
liberty-pole festivals so assiduously promoted by men like Samuel Adams
and Alexander MacDougall: "for they tinge the minds of the people; they
impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty; they render the people
fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all
opposers." In August, 1769, John Adams dined with three hundred and
fifty Sons of Liberty at Dorchester, in an open field. "This," he said,
noting the effect of the patriotic toasts and the inspiring popular
songs,