should hope it might produce order and beauty in the end.

Let us, Sir, embrace some system or other before we end this session. Do
you mean to tax America, and to draw a productive revenue from thence?
If you do, speak out: name, fix, ascertain this revenue; settle its
quantity; define its objects; provide for its collection; and then
fight, when you have something to fight for. If you murder, rob; if you
kill, take possession; and do not appear in the character of madmen as
well as assassins, violent, vindictive, bloody, and tyrannical, without
an object. But may better counsels guide you!

Again, and again, revert to your old principles,--seek peace and ensue
it,--leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I
am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to
mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical
distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they
anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest,
will die along with it. They and we, and their and our ancestors, have
been happy under that system. Let the memory of all actions in
contradiction to that good old mode, on both sides, be extinguished
forever. Be content to bind America by laws of trade: you have always
done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burden
them by taxes: you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this
be your reason for not taxing. These are the arguments of states and
kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools; for there only they may be
discussed with safety. But if, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you
sophisticate and poison the very source of government, by urging subtle
deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the
unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach
them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When