importance they were imagined to be, or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more important and far more powerful principles, which entirely overrule those we had considered as omnipotent.  I am much against any further experiments which tend to put to the proof any more of these allowed opinions which contribute so much to the public tranquillity.  In effect we suffer as much at home by this loosening of all ties, and this concussion of all established opinions as we do abroad; for in order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.  To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.

But, Sir, in wishing to put an end to pernicious experiments, I do not mean to preclude the fullest inquiry.  Far from it.  Far from deciding on a sudden or partial view, [Footnote:  31] I would patiently go round and round the subject, and survey it minutely in every possible aspect.  Sir, if I were capable of engaging you to an equal attention, I would state that, as far as I am capable of discerning, there are but three ways [Footnote:  32] of proceeding relative to this stubborn spirit which prevails in your Colonies, and disturbs your government.  These are—­to change that spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the causes; to prosecute it as criminal; or to comply with it as necessary.  I would not be guilty of an imperfect enumeration; I can think of but these three.  Another has indeed been started,—­that of giving up the Colonies; but it met so slight a reception that I do not think myself obliged to dwell a great while upon it.  It is nothing but a little sally of anger, like the forwardness of peevish children who, when they cannot get all they would have, are resolved to take nothing.

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 in 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 cheek to the growing and alarming mischief of population.