press this claim, until immunity from taxation under their charters was denied; and then they could not withhold it, for, though the right of an Englishman not to be taxed without representation was their right, yet if not nations, but parts of a nation, or dependencies of a nation, and one of the three they must be, the government of Great Britain was their government, and its action, no matter how inequitable, legal.

Highly as they prized their connection with Great Britain, and strongly as their hearts yearned for the old friendly relations, they felt that, if they were to be converted into inferiors, even disastrous war, if it aggravated servitude, must leave them self-respect. The British argument is nowhere so clearly stated or so closely reasoned as in the "Taxation no Tyranny." The premises of that very able paper are: Land in the colonies, in the view of political law, is the territory of England, and the colonists are units of the English nation; the Parliament is their Parliament, in which they are virtually represented as the greater number of Englishmen who have no votes are virtually represented; consequently that Parliament, as the delegated sovereignty of the nation, supreme in all things, may legally if not equitably alter or repeal any charter, and impose any law or duty. England, from the nature of things the stronger element in the nation, both in numbers and wealth, is necessarily the preponderant portion, and as such ought to command, while the colonies, as the minority of the nation, ought to obey. If the colonists have the rights and privileges of Englishmen, they must be subject to the obligations of Englishmen. The issue, nation or nations, could not be more distinctly presented. If the premises were true, the conclusion was legitimate and true, and the Americans must have been, as they seemed to Johnson and to three fourths of his countrymen, insubordinate from avarice, or malignant from obstinacy. But the premises

were not true, because not based upon the genesis of the colonies, nor of the word nation. Nation has but one meaning, and can have no other. It is the mark by which mankind have agreed to express the fact that a certain number of human beings, inhabiting a defined territory, have coalesced by consent, or been compacted by conquest, into a general copartnership, having feelings for each other very different from those they entertain toward the rest of mankind, extending among themselves sympathy, and distributing and regulating selfishness.* In a nation there can be but one sovereignty, Force; and one standard of right and wrong, its Will; therefore Johnson properly deduced his conclusion that, if the colonists were units of a nation, resistance to the act of the sovereign was a violation of the social order. He saw clearly that "in sovereignty there are no gradations; there must be in every society some power from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws and repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or controls privileges, exempt itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity. By this power, wherever it subsists, all legislation is animated and controlled; from this all legal rights are emanations which, whether equitably or not, may be legally recalled. It is not infallible, for it may do wrong; but it is irresistible, for it can only be resisted by rebellion, by an act which makes it questionable what shall thenceforward be the supreme power." This truth, familiar to antiquity, apparent to all who think, was so far from being controverted by the colonists that they made it the basis of all their reason

* "Nation" is often used as a convenient abbreviation in a non-technical sense, they who use and they who hear conscious of the impropriety. So we say habitually the sun rises and sets, not thereby denying the Copernican theory.

ing and action. His own exposition of sovereignty should have shown to Johnson that men not under one single and exclusive government can not be the units of a nation. That objection pressed him so sharply that he could only find escape from it by the assumption that a colony in America and a county in England were politically identical. As Great Britain really, though incidentally, through the king, exercised some important functions of government affecting the colonies, he may have confounded government with sovereignty, as more acute minds have before and since, honestly or dishonestly. The colonists, however, were familiar with the distinction between original and derivative power, and knew that sovereignty makes and unmakes governments. To an American confusion on the subject ought to be impossible, for he knows that in thirteen communities governments were in full and complete operation while the sovereignty in each was debating and deciding upon a new distribution of the functions of government between two agencies, delegating power after it had decided. In the lifetime of Johnson's father the army which had defeated Charles I was sovereign in England. It offered terms to the king, and, agreement failing, struck off his head. It turned Parliament out-of-doors, it set up Oliver Cromwell, it pulled down Richard Cromwell, not representing the feelings or opinions of one fourth of Englishmen, it ruled them as absolutely as the Conqueror William, nor did it cease to be the sovereign until weakened by dissension it ceased to be the force. Government within a nation is the functionary of the society to maintain peace and order among its different elements and to adjust the relations between the stronger and the weaker. It continues unchanged so long as the proportion of strength and weakness remains unchanged. It properly, because equitably, changes, as the proportion of strength and weakness changes. The right of future management is the

same as the right of original management; the reason for both, the welfare of the society.* A government of all of them in communities politically connected, is their functionary to maintain the original terms of union between equals; the shifting of strength is not a shifting of right; disputes between them are to be decided, if justly, by the law of contract, not by that of force, either expressed in numbers or by armies.† Great Britain, ignorant or careless of the only rule under which connected communities can abide together in peace, assumed mastership. If the practical wisdom of her great war minister, or the genius of her great philosophical statesman, could have saved her from (what now all admit) a silly scheme of discord, they were not wanting. Chatham not merely justified the colonies in resistance to taxation, but in armed resistance. He reminded the Lords that what is known as the British Constitution is certain accepted principles of political rights evolved in the growth of the nation; that representation inseparable from taxation was one of those rights, and that the colonists had been guaranteed its protection. He warned them that contempt of constitutional restraint, unjust to America in the present, must work harm to Great Britain in the future, and, prescient of that future, pointed to France and Spain, eagerly watching the maturity of

*The distinction between the nobility and the commons was originally a real one—that is, it was grounded upon a real superiority, physical or moral. But every successive generation tended to make it more and more imaginary, till, at the moment of the final struggle between the two orders, it had no real existence at all. The commons then had become as well qualified as the nobles, both physically and morally, to conduct the affairs of peace and war. -Arnold, Preface to "Thucydides."

The claim in the "Leviathan" that a commonwealth can alienate its sovereignty, and that any government it institutes is an entity distinct from and master of it, not its agent, was supposed buried with the jure divino. It has been revived in the United States by such respectable authority as to merit a rehearing.

error for the opportunity of war. Burke declined to discuss a right of taxation. Evidently, to his mind, if it did not exist, there was an end of controversy; if its existence was so doubtful that men might honestly differ, Englishmen had no right to force their new conclusions upon Americans; and if it did exist, its exercise would be inexpedient, unwise, and unjust, considering the relations up to that period subsisting. "Such is my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up the concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity of operations, that, if I were sure that the colonists had, on leaving this country, sealed a regular contract of servitude, that they had solemnly abjured all rights of citizens, that they had made a vow to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to all generations; yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the temper I found universally prevalent in my own day, and to govern two millions of men, impatient of servitude, upon the principles of freedom. I am not determining a point of law, I am restoring tranquillity; and the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of a government is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or ought to determine. In the character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature, which marks and distinguishes the whole; and, as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth, for the colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant, and they took the bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to