But hard treatment often proves the most useful kind of discipline.  One good effect, so far as we are concerned, that will arise from the harsh conduct of England, will be the promotion of our intellectual and moral independence.  We declared our political independence a good while ago, but this was as a small dividend is declared on a great debt.  We owed a great deal more to posterity than to insure its freedom from political shackles.  The American republic was to be emancipated from every Old-World prejudice that might stand in the way of its entire fulness of development according to its own law, which is in many ways different from any precedent furnished by the earlier forms of civilization.  There were numerous difficulties in the way.  The American talked the language of England, and found a literature ready-made to his hands.  He brought his religion with him, shaped under English influences, whether he called himself Dissenter or not.  He dispensed justice according to the common law of England.  His public assemblies were guided by Parliamentary usage.  His commerce and industry had been so long in tutelage that both required long exercise before they could know their own capacities.

The mother-country held her American colonies as bound to labor for her profit, not their own, just as an artisan claims the whole time of his apprentice.  If we think the policy of England towards America in the year 1863 has been purely selfish, looking solely to her own interest, without any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663.  If her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to have learned our lesson.

Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its preamble stated, “of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and commodities,” etc.  This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the mother-country for most of the products of industry.  But in an infant community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it required another century before an extension of the same system was publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent.  To show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved, short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the disposition of the Colonists.