excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called a House of Commons.  They went much farther; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not.  They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty can subsist.  The Colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles.  Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.  Liberty might be safe, or might be endangered, in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed.  Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.  I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case.  It is not easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries.  The fact is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.

They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their provincial legislative assemblies.  Their governments are popular in an high degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect.  Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.  The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.  This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.  I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute government is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history.  Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least co-eval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from authority.  The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under