The first of these plans—­to change the spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the causes—­I think is the most like a systematic proceeding.  It is radical in its principle; but it is attended with great difficulties:  some of them little short, as I conceive, of impossibilities.  This will appear by examining into the plans which have been proposed.

As the growing population of the colonies is evidently one cause of their resistance, it was last session mentioned in both Houses, by men of weight, and received not without applause, that, in order to check this evil, it would be proper for the crown to make no further grants of land.  But to this scheme there are two objections.  The first, that there is already so much unsettled land in private hands as to afford room for an immense future population, although the crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil.  If this be the case, then the only effect of this avarice of desolation, this hoarding of a royal wilderness, would be to raise the value of the possessions in the hands of the great private monopolists, without any adequate check to the growing and alarming mischief of population.

But if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence?  The people would occupy without grants.  They have already so occupied in many places.  You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts.  If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to another.  Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations.  Already they have topped the Appalachian mountains.  From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow:  a square of five hundred miles.  Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with the habits of their life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars, and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them.  Such would, and, in no long time, must be, the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime, and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence, “Increase and multiply.”  Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God by an express charter has given to the children of men.  Far different, and surely much wiser, has been our policy hitherto.  Hitherto we have invited our people, by every kind of bounty, to fixed establishments.  We have invited the husbandman to look to authority for his title.  We have taught him piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment.  We have thrown each tract of land, as it was peopled, into districts, that the ruling power should never be wholly out of sight.  We have settled all we could; and we have carefully attended every settlement with government.