We are sure that we must have your Majesty’s heart along with us, when we declare in favor of mixing something conciliatory with our force.  Sir, we abhor the idea of making a conquest of our countrymen.  We wish that they may yield to well-ascertained, well-authenticated, and well-secured terms of reconciliation,—­not that your Majesty should owe the recovery of your dominions to their total waste and destruction.  Humanity will not permit us to entertain such a desire; nor will the reverence we bear to the civil rights of mankind make us even wish that questions of great difficulty, of the last importance, and lying deep in the vital principles of the British Constitution, should be solved by the arms of foreign mercenary soldiers.

It is not, Sir, from a want of the most inviolable duty to your Majesty, not from a want of a partial and passionate regard to that part of your empire in which we reside, and which we wish to be supreme, that we have hitherto withstood all attempts to render the supremacy of one part of your dominions inconsistent with the liberty and safety of all the rest.  The motives of our opposition are found in those very sentiments which we are supposed to violate.  For we are convinced beyond a doubt, that a system of dependence which leaves no security to the people for any part of their freedom in their own hands cannot be established in any inferior member of the British empire, without consequentially destroying the freedom of that very body in favor of whose boundless pretensions such a scheme is adopted.  We know and feel that arbitrary power over distant regions is not within the competence, nor to be exercised agreeably to the forms or consistently with the spirit, of great popular assemblies.  If such assemblies are called to a nominal share in the exercise of such power, in order to screen, under general participation, the guilt of desperate measures, it tends only the more deeply to corrupt the deliberative character of those assemblies, in training them to blind obedience, in habituating them to proceed upon grounds of fact with which they can rarely be sufficiently acquainted, and in rendering them executive instruments of designs the bottom of which they cannot possibly fathom.

To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must be left to the colonies.  A military government is the only substitute for civil liberty.  That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part of our concern.  It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our freedom here.  Great bodies of armed men, trained to a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English people,—­kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent, and maintained by that exaction,—­instruments in subverting, without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of governments,—­set