frequently hide themselves in the shade, or shrink into littleness at the frown of a despot. They felt too much for themselves, and feared too much for posterity, longer to balance between either complete or partial submission, or an unreserved and entire claim to absolute independence.
These ideas precipitated the important era when a connexion was dissolved, the continuance of which both nature and affection seemed to require. Great Britain the revered parent, and America the dutiful child, had long been [303] bound together by interest, by a sameness of habits, manners, religion, laws, and government. The recollection of their original consanguinity had always been cherished with an amiable sensibility, or a kind of mechanic enthusiasm, that promoted mutual felicity when they met on each other’s shores, or in distant lands saluted each other in the same language.
A dereliction of old habits of friendship and attachment was far from the wish of many, who had yet strongly opposed the ministerial system: but the period was now arrived, when America felt her wrongs, without hope of redress, and supported her own rights by assuming her rank as a distinct nation on the political theatre. We shall see her relinquish at once all hopes of protection, or fears of control, from the sovereignty of Britain. The reverential awe with which she had formerly viewed her potent parent, was laid aside, and every effort made to forget her fond attachment for a people, that from her earliest infancy she had looked up to as fathers, brothers, and friends.
The severities of the British government towards the American colonies, had not yet taught them to express themselves in any other modes of language, but what indicated their firm attachment to the mother country; nor had they erased the habitual ideas, even of tenderness, conveyed in their usual modes of expression. [304] When they formed a design to visit England, it had always been thus announced, “I am going home.” Home, the seat of happiness, the retreat to all the felicities of the human mind, is too intimately associated with the best feelings of the heart, to renounce without pain, whether applied to the natural or the political parent.
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