Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Eve of the Revolution; a chronicle of the breach with England by Carl Lotus Becker
page 41 of 186 (22%)
old, in terms of what they could sell. From this point of view,
the superiority of the continental over the insular colonies was
not to be doubted. Americans might well find great satisfaction
in this disposition of the mother country to regard her
continental colonies so highly and to think their trade of so
much moment to her; all of which, nevertheless, doubtless
inclined them sometimes to speculate on the delicate question
whether, in case they were so important to the mother country,
they were not perhaps more important to her than she was to them.

The consciousness of rapidly increasing material power, which was
greatly strengthened by the last French war, did nothing to dull
the sense of rights, but it was, on the contrary, a marked
stimulus to the mind in formulating a plausible, if theoretical,
justification of desired aims. Doubtless no American would say
that being able to pay taxes was a good reason for not paying
them, or that obligations might rightly be ignored as soon as one
was in a position to do so successfully; but that he should not
"lose his native rights" any American could more readily
understand when he recalled that his ancestors had without
assistance from the mother country transformed a wilderness into
populous and thriving communities whose trade was now becoming
indispensable to Britain. Therefore, in the summer of 1764,
before the doctrine of colonial rights had been very clearly
stated or much refined, every American knew that the Sugar Act
and also the proposed Stamp Act were grievously burdensome, and
that in some way or other and for reasons which he might not be
able to give with precision, they involved an infringement of
essential English liberties. Most men in the colonies, at this
early date, would doubtless have agreed with the views expressed
DigitalOcean Referral Badge