“Now,” said the King, “if the colonists object to this, it proves that they are determined to rebel against our government.”
He could not conceive of such a thing as a principle against which they were opposed, and many a mind since his has been as blind to principle and as full-eyed toward the question of profit and loss. It is this indescribable thing that usually divides people on public affairs. It likewise defends the Makers of America against the historical interpretation that their revolution was for any such sordid origins as “economic necessity.”
There was strong opposition in parliament, not only against all such taxation but also against asserting the right of such taxation. Lord North, however, reflecting the will of King George, said, “The properest time to exert our right of taxation is when the right is refused.”
So it is with all set wills. The colonists thought the same thing from an opposite point of view. It was an irresistible body meeting an immovable body. Something had to break.
Lord North declared that “a total repeal can not be thought of, till America is prostrate at our feet.” That is, the master determines not to hear the complaint of the slave until the slave’s will is broken at his owner’s feet. The wilderness-made minds with their self-made freedom were not built that way. The King’s mind-evil could not be met by resistence, but, as it emerged into colonial wrongs, the only way to defeat them and save the freedom of moral law was through revolutionary war. The evil mind using coertion to enforce its slave-making wrongs went out of the mental regions of non-resistence into the physical regions of wrongs where nothing but force can save.
Lord North’s promise could have nothing to do with the case. The colonists had no idea of taking such a position as being prostrate at the feet of the King. They had felt the freedom that is born of the wilderness and that freedom was life. It was American and it remains the hope of the world.