government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the
year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State
who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or
small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than
allow his power to be wrested from him by a Caesar or a
Bonaparte. How powerfully did we feel the energy of this
organization in the case of the embargo!"

Notwithstanding the widely different origin of the various
colonists, the circumstances in which they were placed were so
similar, that the same general form of personal character must
inevitably have developed itself, and produced a growing
consciousness of power and impatience of foreign imposition. The
proximate independence of America need not have been a certainty,
however, had the eyes of English statesmen not been blinded to
the truth of the principles urged by such men as Otis in America
and Burke in England. The causes which were to produce a final
rupture were, to be sure, already at work (their full operation
being delayed by the lack of union among the different
provinces), but there was at the same time a warm hereditary
attachment to the parent country, under whose wings the provinces
had grown up, by whose arms they had been shielded, and by whose
commerce, in spite of jealous restrictions, they had been
enriched.

Indeed life in the Colonies was so closely related to that in the
mother country that in a very marked degree, the history of the
Colonies is only the more practical and laborious development of
the spirit of liberty flourishing amid the conditions of life in
the new country under the standard of the laws and traditions of