While this resolution stands alone, the Americans are free from singularity of opinion; their wit has not yet betrayed them to heresy.  While they speak as the naked sons of nature, they claim but what is claimed by other men, and have withheld nothing but what all withhold.  They are here upon firm ground, behind entrenchments which never can be forced.

Humanity is very uniform.  The Americans have this resemblance to Europeans, that they do not always know when they are well.  They soon quit the fortress, that could neither have been ruined by sophistry, nor battered by declamation.  Their next resolution declares, that “Their ancestors, who first settled the colonies, were, at the time of their emigration from the mother-country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects within the realm of England.”

This, likewise, is true; but when this is granted, their boast of original rights is at an end; they are no longer in a state of nature.  These lords of themselves, these kings of ME, these demigods of independence sink down to colonists, governed by a charter.  If their ancestors were subjects, they acknowledged a sovereign; if they had a right to English privileges, they were accountable to English laws; and, what must grieve the lover of liberty to discover, had ceded to the king and parliament, whether the right or not, at least, the power of disposing, “without their consent, of their lives, liberties, and properties.”  It, therefore, is required of them to prove, that the parliament ever ceded to them a dispensation from that obedience, which they owe as natural-born subjects, or any degree of independence or immunity, not enjoyed by other Englishmen.

They say, that by such emigration, they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights; but, that “they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.”

That they who form a settlement by a lawful charter, having committed no crime, forfeit no privileges, will be readily confessed; but what they do not forfeit by any judicial sentence, they may lose by natural effects.  As man can be but in one place, at once, he cannot have the advantages of multiplied residence.  He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.  He who goes voluntarily to America, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe.  He, perhaps, had a right to vote for a knight or burgess; by crossing the Atlantick, he has not nullified his right; but he has made its exertion no longer possible. [32] By his own choice he has left a country, where he had a vote and little property, for another, where he has great property, but no vote.  But as this preference was deliberate and unconstrained, he is still “concerned in the government of himself;” he has reduced himself from a voter, to one of the innumerable multitude that have no vote.  He has truly “ceded his right,” but he still is governed by his own consent; because he has consented to throw his atom of interest into the general mass of the community.  Of the consequences of his own act he has no cause to complain; he has chosen, or intended to choose, the greater good; he is represented, as himself desired, in the general representation.