bullion and other commodities. The result of this was that the Spanish colonists had access to useful commodities from which they would otherwise have been debarred, that the American colonists could without distress remit the specie which was required by the nature of their dealings with England, and that a large market was opened for English products. This widely beneficial trade was incontinently suppressed in 1764, by one of those efforts of short-sighted rigour which might be expected from any government where George Grenville's influence was prominent. All smuggling was to be put down, and as this trade was contraband, it must be put down like the rest. The Government probably acted as they did in answer to the prayers of the mercantile classes, who could not see that they were cutting off the streams that fed their own prosperity. They only saw that a colonial trade had sprung up, and their jealousy blinded them to the benefits that accrued to themselves as a consequence of it. Their folly found them out. The suppression of the colonial trade was entrusted to the commanders of men-of-war. We have had some experience within very recent times of the arbitrary violence, the crass ignorance of law and legal usage, the barbarous insolence, which too often mark people of this kind when

they are temporarily invested with civil authority. We may be sure that they were a great deal more unfit to exercise such authority a hundred years ago than they are even now. We may be sure that the original grievance of the colonists was not softened by the manners of the officers who had to put the law into execution.

The result of the whole transaction was the birth of a very strong sense in the minds of the colonists that the mother country looked upon them as a sponge to be squeezed. This conviction took more. than a passing hold upon them. It was speedily inflamed into inextinguishable heat, first by the news that they were to be taxed without their own consent, and next by the tyrannical and atrocious measures by which it was proposed to crush their resistance.1 The rebellion may be characterised as having first originated in the blind greediness of the English merchants, and as having then been precipitated by the arbitrary ideas of the patricians, in the first instance, and afterwards of the King and

1 Notably by the Duke of Bedford's suggestion that a statute of the reign of Henry VIII. for trying in England persons accused of treason without the realm, should be applied to the Boston leaders. Burke's forcible denunciation of this truly execrable project may be found in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. (Works, i. 206.)

the least educated of the common people. If the severe pressure of the mercantile policy, unflinchingly carried out, had not first filled the colonists with resentment and robbed them of their prosperity, the imperial claim to impose taxes would probably have been submitted to without much ado. And if the suppression of their trade in 1764 had not been instantly followed by Grenville's plan for extorting revenue from them, they would probably in time have been reconciled to the blow which had been dealt to their commerce. It was the conjunction of two highly oppressive pieces of policy which taught them that they would certainly lose more by tame compliance than they could possibly lose by an active resistance.

The conflict was thus a shock in which substantial circumstance encountered a pair of phantoms, the Mercantile Policy and the devotion to barren Rights. False ideas often gain temporary victories over the facts which they no longer cover. In this instance the superior material force and energy happened to be on the side of the facts from the first. The intellectual error of the mercantile system, and the moral error of regarding every fancied or real right as a possession to be vindicated at all hazard and all cost, were thrust into the lower place proper to them. The

claim of actual circumstance to have ideas adjusted to its visible requirements, was triumphantly made good, with a rapidity and completeness of which, alas! history furnishes too few examples.

Much ridicule, a little of it not altogether undeserved, has been thrown upon the opening clause of the Declaration of Independence, which asserts the inherent natural right of man to enjoy life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Yet there is an implied corollary in this which enjoins the highest morality that in our present state we are able to think of as possible. If happiness is the right of our neighbour, then not to hinder him, but to help him in its pursuit, must plainly be our duty. If all men have a claim, then each man is under an obligation. The corollary thus involved is the corner-stone of morality. It was an act of good augury thus to inscribe happiness as entering at once into the right. of all, and into the duty of all, in the very head and front of the new charter, as the base of a national existence, and the first principle of a national government. The omen has not been falsified. The Americans have been true to their first doctrine. They have never swerved aside to set up caste and privilege, to lay down

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the doctrine that one man's happiness ought to be an object of greater solicitude to society than any other man's, or that one order should be encouraged to seek its prosperity through the depression of any other order. Their example proved infectious. The assertion in the New World, that men have a right to happiness and an obligation to promote the happiness of one another, struck a spark in the Old World. Political construction, in America immediately preceded the last violent stage of demolition in Europe.

Burke must often have thought deeply of the destinies of the kindred nation with whose independence his own efforts will ever be so indissolubly associated. But all his reflections upon the future of America, notwithstanding his conviction that her independence was the necessary price of the maintenance of free government in England, must have been tinged with bitterness. Great as America might become, and as he honestly wished her to become, her greatness would bring no renown or laud to the mother-country, or its incomparable Constitution. Though above the narrow vices incident to patriotism in weaker and less loftily moral souls, it could not have been more grievous to him to look back upon the circumstances under which England and her sons parted company, than it was