In this manner Mr. Burke spoke to his constituents seventeen years ago.  He spoke, not like a partisan of one particular member of our Constitution, but as a person strongly, and on principle, attached to them all.  He thought these great and essential members ought to be preserved, and preserved each in its place,—­and that the monarchy ought not only to be secured in its peculiar existence, but in its preeminence too, as the presiding and connecting principle of the whole.  Let it be considered whether the language of his book, printed in 1790, differs from his speech at Bristol in 1774.

With equal justice his opinions on the American war are introduced, as if in his late work he had belied his conduct and opinions in the debates which arose upon that great event.  On the American war he never had any opinions which he has seen occasion to retract, or which he has ever retracted.  He, indeed, differs essentially from Mr. Fox as to the cause of that war.  Mr. Fox has been pleased to say that the Americans rebelled “because they thought they had not enjoyed liberty enough.”  This cause of the war, from him, I have heard of for the first time.  It is true that those who stimulated the nation to that measure did frequently urge this topic.  They contended that the Americans had from the beginning aimed at independence,—­that from the beginning they meant wholly to throw off the authority of the crown, and to break their connection with the parent country.  This Mr. Burke never believed.  When he moved his second conciliatory proposition, in the year 1776, he entered into the discussion of this point at very great length, and, from nine several heads of presumption, endeavored to prove the charge upon that people not to be true.

If the principles of all he has said and wrote on the occasion be viewed with common temper, the gentlemen of the party will perceive, that, on a supposition that the Americans had rebelled merely in order to enlarge their liberty, Mr. Burke would have thought very differently of the American cause.  What might have been in the secret thoughts of some of their leaders it is impossible to say.  As far as a man so locked up as Dr. Franklin could be expected to communicate his ideas, I believe he opened them to Mr. Burke.  It was, I think, the very day before he set out for America that a very long conversation passed between them, and with a greater air of openness on the Doctor’s side than Mr. Burke had observed in him before.  In this discourse Dr. Franklin lamented, and with apparent sincerity, the separation which he feared was inevitable between Great Britain and her colonies.  He certainly spoke of it as an event which gave him the greatest concern.  America, he said, would never again see such happy days as she had passed under the protection of England.  He observed, that ours was the only instance of a great empire in which the most distant parts and members had been as well governed as the metropolis and its