bill brought in for quiet rejected, even on the first proposition.  The petitions of the colonies have not been admitted even to an hearing.  The very possibility of public agency, by which such petitions could authentically arrive at Parliament, has been evaded and chicaned away.  All the public declarations which indicate anything resembling a disposition to reconciliation seem to us loose, general, equivocal, capable of various meanings, or of none; and they are accordingly construed differently, at different times, by those on whose recommendation they have been made:  being wholly unlike the precision and stability of public faith, and bearing no mark of that ingenuous simplicity and native candor and integrity which formerly characterized the English nation.

Instead of any relaxation of the claim of taxing at the discretion of Parliament, your ministers have devised a new mode of enforcing that claim, much more effectual for the oppression of the colonies, though not for your Majesty’s service, both as to the quantity and application, than any of the former methods; and their mode has been expressly held out by ministers as a plan not to be departed from by the House of Commons, and as the very condition on which the legislature is to accept the dependence of the colonies.

At length, when, after repeated refusals to hear or to conciliate, an act dissolving your government, by putting your people in America out of your protection, was passed, your ministers suffered several months to elapse without affording to them, or to any community or any individual amongst them, the means of entering into that protection, even on unconditional submission, contrary to your Majesty’s gracious declaration from the throne, and in direct violation of the public faith.

We cannot, therefore, agree to unite in new severities against the brethren of our blood for their asserting an independency, to which we know, in our conscience, they have been necessitated by the conduct of those very persons who now make use of that argument to provoke us to a continuance and repetition of the acts which in a regular series have led to this great misfortune.

The reasons, dread Sir, which have been used to justify this perseverance in a refusal to hear or conciliate have been reduced into a sort of Parliamentary maxims which we do not approve.  The first of these maxims is, “that the two Houses ought not to receive (as they have hitherto refused to receive) petitions containing matter derogatory to any part of the authority they claim.”  We conceive this maxim and the consequent practice to be unjustifiable by reason or the practice of other sovereign powers, and that it must be productive, if adhered to, of a total separation between this kingdom and its dependencies.  The supreme power, being in ordinary cases the ultimate judge, can, as we conceive, suffer nothing in having any part of his rights excepted to, or even discussed