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[198] permanent, and effectual. Its real stamina are to be
Chap. XVIII.} 1775. Jan. 20.
looked for among the cultivators of the land; in their simplicity of life is found the integrity and courage of freedom. These true sons of the earth are invincible.

This spirit of independence, animating the nation of America, is not new among them; it is, and has ever been, their confirmed persuasion. When the repeal of the stamp act was in agitation, a person of undoubted respect and authenticity on that subject, assured me that these were the prevalent and steady principles of America; that you might destroy their towns, and cut them off from the superfluities, perhaps the conveniences of life; but that they were prepared to despise your power, and would not lament their loss, whilst they have—what, my lords?—their woods and their liberty.

If illegal violences have been committed in America, prepare the way for acknowledgment and satisfaction; but cease your indiscriminate inflictions; amerce not thirty thousand; oppress not three millions for the fault of forty or fifty individuals. Such severity of injustice must irritate your colonies to unappeasable rancor. What though you march from town to town, and from province to province? How shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent?

This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen from the nature of things and of mankind; above all from the whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit

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