endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed.  Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.  I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case.  It is not easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries.  The fact is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.

They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their provincial legislative assemblies.  Their governments are popular in an high degree:  some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect.  Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.  The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.  This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.  I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute government is so much to be sought in their religious tenets as in their history.  Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails, that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from authority.  The Church of England, too, was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government.  But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty.  Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim.  All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent.  But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance:  it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.  This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces, where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing, most probably, the tenth of the people.  The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.