impressively. As for the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, "It is less than nothing in my consideration. My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question. I do not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of Government; and how far all forms of polity are entitled to an exercise of that right by the charter of nature. Or whether, on the contrary, a right of taxation is necessarily involved in the general principle of legislation, and inseparable from the ordinary supreme power. These are deep questions where great names militate against each other; where reason is perplexed; and an appeal to authorities only thickens the confusion. For high and reverend authorities lift up their heads on both sides, and there is no sure footing in the middle. This point is the great Serbonian bog, betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, where armies whole have sunk.' I do not intend to be overwhelmed in that bog, though in such respectable company. The question with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I

ought to do. Is a politic act the worse for being a generous one? Is no concession proper but that which is made from your want of right to keep what you grant? Or does it lessen the grace and dignity of relaxing in the exercise of an odious claim, because you have your evidence-room full of titles, and your magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them?

"What signify all these titles and all these arms? Of what avail are they, when the reason of the thing tells me that the assertion of my title is the loss of my suit; and that I could do nothing but wound myself by the use of my own weapons? Such is steadfastly, my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up the concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity of operations, that if I were sure the colonists had, at their leaving this country, sealed a regular compact of servitude; that they solemnly abjured all the rights of citizens; that they had made a vow to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to all generations, yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the temper I found universally prevalent in my own day, and to govern two millions of men impatient of servitude, on the principles of freedom. I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity, and the

general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fitted for them.”1

The defenders of expediency as the criterion of morals are commonly charged by their opponents with holding a doctrine that lowers the moral capabilities, and that would ruin society if it were unfortunately to gain general acceptance. The king and the minister in 1774 entertained this view, and scorned to submit their policy to so mean a test as that prescribed by the creed of utility. If they had listened to the voice of the most eloquent and sagacious of the upholders of this test, they would have saved the empire. If they had for a moment awakened to the utilitarian truth, that the statesman is concerned, not at all with the rights of the government, but altogether with the interests and happiness of the governed; if they had weighed their policy in the capacious balance of expediency, rather than with the airy, unreal, deceptive apparatus of the abstract principles of sovereignty, at least the separation of the mother country from her too powerful sons might have been effected as such a change ought to have been effected. As it was, the disaster in which they were finally overwhelmed formed an expressive comment upon the supremacy of

1 Speech on Conciliation with America, Works, i. 192, a.

the metaphysical notion of absolute right in practical politics. The actual bearings of circumstances, so visible to anybody who, like Burke, looked upon them from the point of high practical sense, were hidden from the sight of men who surrounded themšelves with a hazy medium of abstract and universally applicable ideas. The conception of an indefeasible right of sovereignty blinded them. It was they who were thus kept grovelling along the lowest ground, while their opponents, who chose to measure their policy by the standard of convenience, of the interest of the greatest number, of utility and expediency, were guided by it to the loftiest heights of political wisdom and beneficence.7

The baneful superstition that there is in morals, and in the art of politics, therefore, which is a province of morals, some supernaturally illumined lamp, still survives to make men neglect the intelligible and available tests of public convenience and practical justice, which is no more than expediency in its widest shape. If Burke were among us at this day, enjoining habitual recourse in every political measure to this standard, he would find that men are nearly as disposed as ever to reason downwards from high-sounding ideas of Right, Sovereignty, Property, and so forth; which have in

truth no invariable conformity to facts, and which are only treated with reverence because they are absurdly supposed to be ultimate, eternal entities, incapable of further resolution. Are we sure that if a set of conditions similar to those of 1776 were to recur in our own time, we should be wise enough to toss aside lawyers' questions as to the exact measure and boundaries of our rights, and examine positively and simply what would be the course most likely to reconcile the best interests of all the people concerned? If anybody is sure of this, let him look at Ireland and the policy of the landowners' party in that country.

The same vicious spirit of adherence to the very letter of legal or quasi-constitutional rights had ever marked the whole policy of England towards her American dependencies. It was the same spirit which, long before Grenville's scheme of taxation, had planted and nourished the germs of discord between the mother country and the colonies. The Stamp Act and the Tea Duty were no more than the last drops in a full cup. They were the assertion of a right of one kind, made without any thought as to the profit to be drawn from it. The laws regulating the commerce of the colonies were the assertion of a right of another