Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place whose worship and service has cost the race so dear, are discovered and shown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that they are.  Fox once urged members of Parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliation again and again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress it on their hearts.  But Fox only referred to the lesson which he thought to be contained in it, that representation is the sovereign remedy for every evil.  This is by far the least important of its lessons.  It is great in many ways.  It is greatest as a remonstrance and an answer against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national pride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest; and here it is great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because they expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults of heart and temper, as well as of understanding, which move nations to haughty and violent courses.

The great argument with those of the war party who pretended to a political defence of their position, was the doctrine that the English Government was sovereign in the colonies as at home; and in the notion of sovereignty they found inherent the notion of an indefeasible right to impose and exact taxes.  Having satisfied themselves of the existence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they took to be its natural property, they saw no step between the existence of an abstract right and the propriety of enforcing it.  We have seen an instance of a similar mode of political thinking in our own lifetime.  During the great civil war between the northern and southern states of the American Union, people in England convinced themselves—­some after careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances at second-hand authorities—­that the south had a right to secede.  The current of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to which the United States owed their separate existence.  Now the idea of a right as a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in a state of naked divorce from expediency and convenience, was one that Burke’s political judgment found preposterous and unendurable.  He hated the arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the English assumptions over the colonies.  And his repulsion was heightened when he found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanent advantage which their victory would procure for the mother country or for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a victory; not by the assertion and demonstration of some positive duty, but by the futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do something or other, if we liked.