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Now the English were logically and legally right. In the first place, the colonies had demonstrated both their unwillingness and their inability to protect themselves. In the second place, England had made all preparations to render this protection herself. It certainly was only just that the Americans pay the material cost. So much for logic.
The legal aspect of the case is even stronger. The colonies, under the demagogic influence of men like Adams, declared that taxation was not repulsive to them; what they demanded was that they be represented at the source of taxation. They forgot in the first instance, that they had been given an opportunity to form a union for defence at the Albany Conference and had neglected to avail themselves of it; and, in the second instance, they failed to recognise that the British Parliament, as inheritor of all the ancient prerogatives of the Crown, was through each and every charter granted, no matter in what form, to each and every colony the sovereign source of that colony's legal existence whose paramountcy had never been question nor denied. The fundamental basis of sovereignty is the power of taxation; hence to deny the right of the Parliament to levy taxes was to deny its sovereignty. Yet the colonies acknowledged the sovereign supremacy of the British Parliament, putting themselves therebb in an impossible position.
Moreover, the Parliament did not propose to levy internal taxes; customs duties formed the question at issue. Now, by all the precedents and all the charters and all the contemporary colonial policies, a mother country's control over the commerce of her satellites throughout the world was absolute and inviolable--and up till now the Americans had recognised the fact. Consequently, in attempting to levy duties at ports of ingress and egress on the Atlantic seaboard of the American Colonies, Great Britain was clearly within her rights; was only acting as any other colonial power of the time might have acted and did act; and was, moreover, levying these duties not for her own aggrandisement, but for the purpose of defending her colonies from their enemies.
Nevertheless the break came. It came because the colonies had possessed all of the benefits of separate existence without any of the responsibilities. The Empire had always protected them; they had never been called upon to defend the Empire except in a small, local way. When they wore finally asked to share in imperial defence they balked. The commercial system of the age, entailing as it did colonial dependence upon the mother country, had made them myopic and selfish. Immersed in the petty details of provincial existence, they became blind to the vast expanse of the imperial life.
This commercial system, coupled with the pigheadedness of the eighteenth century political attitude and the stubborn colonial sordidness of spirit, sundered the Anglo-Saxon race.
