are already greater than the king wishes us to be, and will he not hereafter endeavour to make us less?  To bring the matter to one point.  Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us?  Whoever says No to this question, is an independant, for independancy means no more, than, whether we shall make our own laws, or whether the king, the greatest enemy this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us “There shall be no laws but such as I like.”

But the king you will say has a negative in England; the people there can make no laws without his consent.  In point of right and good order, there is something very ridiculous, that a youth of twenty-one (which hath often happened) shall say to several millions of people, older and wiser than himself, I forbid this or that act of yours to be law.  But in this place I decline this sort of reply, though I will never cease to expose the absurdity of it, and only answer, that England being the King’s residence, and America not so, makes quite another case.  The king’s negative here is ten times more dangerous and fatal than it can be in England, for there he will scarcely refuse his consent to a bill for putting England into as strong a state of defense as possible, and in America he would never suffer such a bill to be passed.

America is only a secondary object in the system of British politics, England consults the good of this country, no farther than it answers her own purpose.  Wherefore, her own interest leads her to suppress the growth of Ours in every case which doth not promote her advantage, or in the least interferes with it.  A pretty state we should soon be in under such a secondhand government, considering what has happened!  Men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name:  And in order to shew that reconciliation now is a dangerous doctrine, I affirm, that it would be policy in the king at this time, to repeal the acts for the sake of reinstating himself in the government of the provinces; in order, that he may accomplish by Craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one.  Reconciliation and ruin are nearly related.

Secondly.  That as even the best terms, which we can expect to obtain, can amount to no more than a temporary expedient, or a kind of government by guardianship, which can last no longer than till the colonies come of age, so the general face and state of things, in the interim, will be unsettled and unpromising.  Emigrants of property will not choose to come to a country whose form of government hangs but by a thread, and who is every day tottering on the brink of commotion and disturbance; and numbers of the present inhabitants would lay hold of the interval, to dispense of their effects, and quit the continent.