adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic
and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive
settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or three
generations of men had passed away, but they had increased
and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land itself
had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody seven
years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized
nations of Europe contending for the possession of this
continent.

Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She
had conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her
rival totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself
by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire
only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the
Indian tribes still tenanting the forests unexplored by the
European man. She had established an uncontested monopoly
of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the
warnings of preceding ages--forgetting the lessons written in
the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed
time--she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without
their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic,
inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused
the people of all the English colonies on this continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union. The
struggle was for chartered rights--for English liberties--for the
cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden--for trial by jury-