Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Birth of the Republic: Compiled From the National and Colonial Histories and Historical Collections, From the American Archives and From Memoirs, and From the Journals and Proceedings of the British Parliament
That the American Colonies were destined to become independent of Great Britain, and that the occurrence of the event was only a question of time, was foreseen nearly a century before it came to pass. Lord Mansfield, in his speech in the House of Lords, on the Duke of Grafton's motion for an address to the King, November 15, 1775, makes this fact clear by the following statement, which at the same time exhibits the shop-keeping narrowness and illiberality of his own mind. He says:
"The bad consequences of planting Northern Colonies were early predicted. Sir Josiah Child foretold, before the Revolution [the English Revolution of 1688-'89], that they would, in the end, prove our rivals in power, commerce, and manufactures. Davenant, adopting the same ideas, foresaw what has since happened: he foresaw that, whenever America found herself of sufficient strength to contend with the mother-country, she would endeavor to form herself into a separate and independent State. This has been the constant object of New England almost from her earliest in fancy. Their struggles in the reign of King William compelled that Prince to recall their former charter and give them a new one, and, towards the conclusion of his reign, to get an act passed that no law enacted in the Colonies should be valid, if contrary to any law at the time existing in England. Those disputes scarce subsided from that day to this. I remember, in 1733, Mr. Talbot (after wards counsellor) proposed a set of Resolutions, in the House of Commons, in which the nature of the disputes then subsisting were directly pointed at, and similar doc trines to those maintained at present by the British Parliament fully asserted."
This citation from the speech of Lord Mansfield demonstrates the truth that a man may be a great lawyer, and at the same time be a very narrow-minded statesman that he may be profoundly learned in the laws, and be pre-eminently fitted to expound them, without having the slightest qualification to make laws. Here, to the westward of the Atlantic Ocean, lay a continent all untilled, and almost unpeopled.
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