We cannot attribute so much to the power of faction, at the expense of human nature, as to suppose, that, in any part of the world, a combination of men, few in number, not considerable in rank, of no natural hereditary dependencies, should be able, by the efforts of their policy alone, or the mere exertion of any talents, to bring the people of your American dominions into the disposition which has produced the present troubles.  We cannot conceive, that, without some powerful concurring cause, any management should prevail on some millions of people, dispersed over an whole continent, in thirteen provinces, not only unconnected, but, in many particulars of religion, manners, government, and local interest, totally different and adverse, voluntarily to submit themselves to a suspension of all the profits of industry and all the comforts of civil life, added to all the evils of an unequal war, carried on with circumstances of the greatest asperity and rigor.  This, Sir, we conceive, could never have happened, but from a general sense of some grievance so radical in its nature and so spreading in its effects as to poison all the ordinary satisfactions of life, to discompose the frame of society, and to convert into fear and hatred that habitual reverence ever paid by mankind to an ancient and venerable government.

That grievance is as simple in its nature, and as level to the most ordinary understanding, as it is powerful in affecting the most languid passions:  it is—­

“AN ATTEMPT MADE TO DISPOSE OF THE PROPERTY OF A WHOLE PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.”

Your Majesty’s English subjects in the colonies, possessing the ordinary faculties of mankind, know that to live under such a plan of government is not to live in a state of freedom.  Your English subjects in the colonies, still impressed with the ancient feelings of the people from whom they are derived, cannot live under a government which does not establish freedom as its basis.

This scheme, being, therefore, set up in direct opposition to the rooted and confirmed sentiments and habits of thinking of an whole people, has produced the effects which ever must result from such a collision of power and opinion.  For we beg leave, with all duty and humility, to represent to your Majesty, (what we fear has been industriously concealed from you,) that it is not merely the opinion of a very great number, or even of the majority, but the universal sense of the whole body of the people in those provinces, that the practice of taxing, in the mode and on the principles which have been lately contended for and enforced, is subversive of all their rights.