BOOK XI. PROGRESS OF THE STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, TILL THEIR CHAPTER I. Relative position of Britain and her Colonies. -Policy of the British Court- -- I. 1764. THE notion which we have remarked1 as having been sug- CHAP. gested to the people of New England in the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the failure of various attempts of the British government to conquer Canada,-that it was not the will of Providence that North America should be subjected to the sole dominion of one European state, was substantially prophetic. The solitary superiority which Britain at length acquired over America, was destined to be short-lived: and the concentration was nearly coeval with the dissolution of European ascendancy and monarchical power in this quarter of the world. It would be absurd to suppose that Great Britain, even by the mildest and most liberal system of policy, could have retained the American provinces in perpetual submission to her authority. Their great and rapid advancement in popula 1 Ante, Book VIII. chap. i. : BOOK tion, and the vast distance by which they were detached from XI. the parent state, combined with other causes to generate 1764. ideas of freedom and independence in the minds of their inhabitants, and portended an inevitable, though, in point of time, an indefinite limit to the connection between the two countries. A separate and independent political existence was the natural and reasonable consummation to which the progress of society in America was tending and Great Britain, eventually, had but to choose between a graceful compliance, or a fruitless struggle, with this irrepressible development. By wisdom and prudence, she might, indeed, have retarded the catastrophe, and even rendered its actual occurrence instrumental to the confirmation of friendship and good will between the two countries: but her conduct and policy were perversely calculated to provoke and hasten its arrival, and to blend its immortal remembrance with impressions of resentment, enmity, and strife. Relative position of Britain and her Colonies. We have beheld various disputes and controversies arise from time to time between Britain and her colonies, and a reciprocal and progressive jealousy of each other, mingle with the other sentiments that resulted from their connection. Of the controversies that had already occurred between royal or national prerogative on the one hand, and provincial liberty on the other, some, without being adjusted to the satisfaction of either party, had terminated by leaving each in possession, if not in the exercise, of pretensions inconsistent with the avowed claims of the other: and though in certain instances, the colonists had been obliged reluctantly to yield to the superior power which backed the pretensions of the parent state, the rapid increase of their strength and numbers manifestly rendered a submission thus maintained unstable and precarious. The whole strain of British legislation had proclaimed that America was regarded by the British cabinet and by the merchants and manufacturers who influenced its colonial policy, less as an integral part, than a dependent and tributary adjunct of the British empire; and with the growth of the American states, there had grown an indignant conviction in the minds of many of their inhabitants, that their enjoyment of the hard-earned fruits of the dangers, toils, and sufferings by which they had added so many provinces to the I. British crown, was unjustly and tyrannically circumscribed, for CHAP. the advantage of the distant community whence oppression had compelled themselves or their fathers to emigrate, and as the 1764. tribute for a protection which they always regarded as scanty and inefficient, and daily found less requisite to their security. We have seen1 that long before the conquest of Canada was achieved, the American colonists were prepossessed with the conviction that Britain dreaded this acquisition as perilous to the stability of her colonial empire. The occasion which they had judged or supposed her to judge so critical to their political relation, now occurred. The late war, which among other results, enlarged the British empire by the conquest of Canada, loaded Britain with a vast addition to her national debt, and finally issued in a treaty of which all parties perceived, as soon as the heat of controversy and the illusions of national glory had subsided, that the grand effect consisted in the accession that was made to the domestic strength and resources of the British settlements in America. While the issue of the contest was thus favourable to America, and, in immediate effect, profitless if not disadvantageous to Britain; its history afforded to the parent state occasion more plausible than just, to impute all her efforts to a generous concern for the protection and defence of her colonial offspring. From this, there was a brief and easy advance to the persuasion, that the dependent people who had reaped such high and exclusive benefit from the war, should be compelled not only to relieve the parent state of all the burdens which it had entailed on her, but to incur such additional sacrifices as might exempt the parent state from the apprehension of their abusing the advantages and opportunities now placed within their grasp. If it was natural that such views should be impressed on the friends of British supremacy, by the issue of the late war, it was not less natural that this issue should inspire the partizans of American liberty with very opposite hopes and ideas. They naturally expected to reap advantage from the crisis whence their political opponents derived auguries of danger and trouble. Perhaps, if Pitt had still directed the policy of the British cabinet, a line of conduct might have 1 Ante, Book X. chap. ii. |