wrong in denying the power of Parliament to tax the Colonies; but there was better judgment in their counsels, though founded on false premises, than in those of Grenville and Townsend, though theirs was the more correct view of the constitutional power of legislation.  The two peers were wrong in their principle; the two Chancellors of the Exchequer were unwise in their application of their principle; and the practical error was the more disastrous one.

It is now generally admitted that the true statesman-like course toward the Colonies was that adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues in 1765—­to avoid weakening the supreme power of Parliament by any disavowal of the right to tax but to avoid imperilling the sovereign authority of the King by a novel exertion of it.  As much of our common English law is made up of precedent, so, in a still greater degree, are our feelings and ideas of our rights and privileges regulated by precedent.  And we lost America because in 1764 and 1767 neither minister nor Parliament took men’s feelings and prejudices into account.  The loss of the United States, therefore, was a lesson not undeserved; and by our statesmen since that day it has been taken in the right spirit of profiting by its teaching as a guide to their own conduct.  Since that day the enterprise of our people has planted our flag in regions far more distant, and has extended the dominion of our sovereign over provinces far more extensive than those which we then lost.  And on some of the administrations of the present reign the duty has fallen of framing schemes of government for those new acquisitions, as also for some of those previously possessed.  In how different a spirit from that which actuated the early ministers of George III.[57] those to whom the task was committed by Queen Victoria applied themselves to their task may be seen in a maxim laid down by the present Lord Grey, when he presided at the Colonial Office (1846-1852), that “the success of free institutions in any country depends far less upon the particular form of those institutions than upon the character of the people on whom they are conferred.”  But how he and others in the same office carried out that principle must be reserved for a later chapter.

Besides the numerous motions which were brought forward by the Opposition respecting the continuance and conduct of the war, there were several also which were indirectly prompted by it.  The Opposition claimed to be on this subject not only the champions of the real interests of the nation, but also its spokesmen, who expressed the opinions and feelings of all the thinking and independent portion of the people.  That their efforts were overborne they attributed to the subservience of the Parliament to the ministers, and of the ministers to the crown.[58] And consequently several motions were made by members of that party, the object of which was, in one way or another, to diminish what they regarded as the undue influence of the crown.