When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favor.  It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational cause of fear, if the inferior body can be made to believe that the party inclination or political views of several in the principal state will induce them in some degree to counteract this blind and tyrannical partiality.  There is no danger that any one acquiring consideration or power in the presiding state should carry this leaning to the inferior too far.  The fault of human nature is not of that sort.  Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.  But one great advantage to the support of authority attends such an amicable and protecting connection:  that those who have conferred favors obtain influence, and from the foresight of future events can persuade men who have received obligations sometimes to return them.  Thus, by the mediation of those healing principles, (call them good or evil,) troublesome discussions are brought to some sort of adjustment, and every hot controversy is not a civil war.

But, if the colonies (to bring the general matter home to us) could see that in Great Britain the mass of the people is melted into its government, and that every dispute with the ministry must of necessity be always a quarrel with the nation, they can stand no longer in the equal and friendly relation of fellow-citizens to the subjects of this kingdom.  Humble as this relation may appear to some, when it is once broken, a strong tie is dissolved.  Other sort of connections will be sought.  For there are very few in the world who will not prefer an useful ally to an insolent master.

Such discord has been the effect of the unanimity into which so many have of late been seduced or bullied, or into the appearance of which they have sunk through mere despair.  They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion.  Men of great presumption and little knowledge will hold a language which is contradicted by the whole course of history. General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged, now or at any time.  They are always provoked.  But if this unheard-of doctrine of the encouragement of rebellion were true, if it were true that an assurance of the friendship of numbers in this country towards the colonies could become an encouragement to them to break off all connection with it, what is the inference?  Does anybody seriously maintain, that, charged with my share of the public councils, I am obliged not to resist projects which I think mischievous, lest men who suffer should be encouraged to resist?  The very tendency of such projects to produce rebellion is one of the chief reasons against them.  Shall that reason not be given?  Is it, then, a rule,