and acknowledged the claimer. It was, in reality, of no very great
importance who was her master, seeing, that from the force and
ambition of the different powers of Europe, she must, till she
acquired strength enough to assert her own right, acknowledge some
one. As well, perhaps, Britain as another; and it might have been as
well to have been under the states of Holland as any. The same hopes
of engrossing and profiting by her trade, by not oppressing it too
much, would have operated alike with any master, and produced to the
colonies the same effects. The clamor of protection, likewise, was
all a farce; because, in order to make that protection necessary, she
must first, by her own quarrels, create us enemies. Hard terms indeed!

To know whether it be the interest of the continent to be
independent, we need only ask this easy, simple question: Is it the
interest of a man to be a boy all his life? The answer to one will be
the answer to both. America hath been one continued scene of
legislative contention from the first king's representative to the
last; and this was unavoidably founded in the natural opposition of
interest between the old country and the new. A governor sent from
England, or receiving his authority therefrom, ought never to have
been considered in any other light than that of a genteel
commissioned spy, whose private business was information, and his
public business a kind of civilized oppression. In the first of these
characters he was to watch the tempers, sentiments, and disposition
of the people, the growth of trade, and the increase of private
fortunes; and, in the latter, to suppress all such acts of the
assemblies, however beneficial to the people, which did not directly
or indirectly throw some increase of power or profit into the hands
of those that sent him.