transmitted through any of the ordinary artificial media of a positive constitution.  It was not a manufacture ready formed, and transmitted to them in that condition from England.  The evil arising from hence is this:  that the colonists having once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages of order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they had appeared before the trial.

Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths, we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts.  We were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission.  The experiment was tried.  A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared.  Anarchy is found tolerable.  A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor, for near a twelvemonth, without governor, without public council, without judges, without executive magistrates.  How long it will continue in this state, or what may arise out of this unheard-of situation, how can the wisest of us conjecture?  Our late experience has taught us that many of those fundamental principles formerly believed infallible are either not of the importance they were imagined to be, or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more important and far more powerful principles which entirely overrule those we had considered as omnipotent.  I am much against any further experiments which tend to put to the proof any more of these allowed opinions which contribute so much to the public tranquillity.  In effect, we suffer as much at home by this loosening of all ties, and this concussion of all established opinions, as we do abroad.  For, in order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.  To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.

But, Sir, in wishing to put an end to pernicious experiments, I do not mean to preclude the fullest inquiry.  Far from it.  Far from deciding on a sudden or partial view, I would patiently go round and round the subject, and survey it minutely in every possible aspect.  Sir, if I were capable of engaging you to an equal attention, I would state, that, as far as I am capable of discerning, there are but three ways of proceeding relative to this stubborn spirit which prevails in your colonies and disturbs your government.  These are,—­to change that spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the causes,—­to prosecute it, as criminal,—­or to comply with it, as necessary.  I would not be guilty of an imperfect enumeration; I can think of but these three.  Another has, indeed, been started,—­that of giving up the colonies; but it met so slight a reception that I do not think myself obliged to dwell a great while upon it.  It is nothing but a little sally of anger, like the frowardness of peevish children, who, when they cannot get all they would have, are resolved to take nothing.