Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our Colonies which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit.  I mean their education.  In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study.  The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead.  The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers.  But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science.  I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations.  The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use.  I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone’s Commentaries in America as in England.  General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table.  He states that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions.  The smartness of debate will say that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion.  All this is mighty well.  But my honorable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground.  He has heard, as well as I, that when great honors and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government.  If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores.  This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources.  In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.  They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the Colonies is hardly less powerful than the rest, as it is not merely moral, but laid deep in the natural constitution of things.  Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them.  No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government.  Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system.  You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea.  But there a power steps in that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, So far shalt thou go, and no farther.