The war is now of full two years’ standing:  the controversy of many more.  In different periods of the dispute, different methods of reconciliation were to be pursued.  I mean to trouble you with a short state of things at the most important of these periods, in order to give you a more distinct idea of our policy with regard to this most delicate of all objects.  The colonies were from the beginning subject to the legislature of Great Britain on principles which they never examined; and we permitted to them many local privileges, without asking how they agreed with that legislative authority.  Modes of administration were formed in an insensible and very unsystematic manner.  But they gradually adapted themselves to the varying condition of things.  What was first a single kingdom stretched into an empire; and an imperial superintendence, of some kind or other, became necessary.  Parliament, from a mere representative of the people, and a guardian of popular privileges for its own immediate constituents, grew into a mighty sovereign.  Instead of being a control on the crown on its own behalf, it communicated a sort of strength to the royal authority, which was wanted for the conservation of a new object, but which could not be safely trusted to the crown alone.  On the other hand, the colonies, advancing by equal steps, and governed by the same necessity, had formed within themselves, either by royal instruction or royal charter, assemblies so exceedingly resembling a parliament, in all their forms, functions, and powers, that it was impossible they should not imbibe some opinion of a similar authority.

At the first designation of these assemblies, they were probably not intended for anything more (nor perhaps did they think themselves much higher) than the municipal corporations within this island, to which some at present love to compare them.  But nothing in progression can rest on its original plan.  We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.  Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a numerous and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe, it was natural that they should attribute to assemblies so respectable in their formal constitution some part of the dignity of the great nations which they represented.  No longer tied to by-laws, these assemblies made acts of all sorts and in all cases whatsoever.  They levied money, not for parochial purposes, but upon regular grants to the crown, following all the rules and principles of a parliament, to which they approached every day more and more nearly.  Those who think themselves wiser than Providence and stronger than the course of Nature may complain of all this variation, on the one side or the other, as their several humors and prejudices may lead them.  But things could not be otherwise; and English colonies must be had on these terms, or not had at all.  In the mean time neither party felt any inconvenience from this