But if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence?  The people would occupy without grants.  They have already so occupied in many places.  You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts.  If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to another.  Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations.  Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains.  From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles.  Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with the habits of their life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them.  Such would, and in no long time must be, the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of providence, increase and multiply.  Such would be the happy result of the endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.  Far different, and surely much wiser, has been our policy hitherto.  Hitherto we have invited our people, by every kind of bounty, to fixed establishments.  We have invited the husbandman to look to authority for his title.  We have taught him piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment.  We have thrown each tract of land, as it was peopled, into districts, that the ruling power should never be wholly out of sight.  We have settled all we could; and we have carefully attended every settlement with government.

Adhering, Sir, as I do, to this policy, as well as for the reasons I have just given, I think this new project of hedging-in population to be neither prudent nor practicable.

To impoverish the Colonies in general, and in particular to arrest the noble course of their marine enterprises, would be a more easy task.  I freely confess it.  We have shown a disposition to a system of this kind, a disposition even to continue the restraint after the offence, looking on ourselves as rivals to our Colonies, and persuaded that of course we must gain all that they shall lose.  Much mischief we may certainly do.  The power inadequate to all other things is often more than sufficient for this.  I do not look on the direct and immediate power of the Colonies to resist our violence as very formidable.  In this, however, I may be mistaken.  But when I consider that we have Colonies for no purpose but to be serviceable to us, it seems to my poor understanding a little preposterous to make them unserviceable in order to keep them obedient.  It is, in truth,