In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole:  and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.  This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.

First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.  England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.  The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.  They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles.  Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.  Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.  It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing.  Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state.  The question of money was not with them so immediate.  But in England it was otherwise.  On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.  In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called an House of Commons:  they went much further:  they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons, as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not.  They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist.  The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles.  Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.  Liberty might be safe or might be