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316 therefore if they thought of self-defence and resistance, that their habits of obedience were broken, and their reverence towards this country diminished.

"The feelings of mankind are generally more to be depended upon than their understandings. In England the Stamp Act was a speculative point, but in America the meanest settler felt his freedom and his property to depend on the event.

"It is clear that the British Government ought to have enforced that Act with its whole power, or to have acknowledged its error with ingenuousness and candour, which would have showed a frankness and condescension which must have been interpreted into true dignity; but unhappily the British Parliament did neither. It affirmed its own right of enacting, whilst it repealed the Act itself in visible complaisance to the clamour of America, and thereby naturally suggested to the Provinces, that the timidity of the British Parliament kept pace with its ill dispositions towards them.

"To the law declarative of the right of the British Parliament, were added resolutions that the sufferers by the riots in America ought to be compensated by the American Assemblies. The first served to excite ill-humour; the last furnished a subject for the exercise of it; and the whole together gave occasions to turbulent and seditious men, to inflame for their own purposes the disorders of America; and by promoting indecent resolutions and suggesting improper words and expressions, they seem successfully to have laid a ground for more resentments here, and consequently for more fears, doubts, and animosities in America.

"To these misfortunes has been added the Mutiny Act, which strangely enacts that the American Assemblies shall enact that certain Articles be provided for the Troops in barracks there. The whole amount of those Articles is I suppose a mere trifle, not worth the contending for; but it is a question of real importance to America, whether their Assemblies are obliged to enact implicitly points concerning which all debate is precluded, and whether