The colonies were all erected and
endowed with their rights and powers by one and the same national
authority, and the colonists were subjects of one and the same
national sovereign. Mr. Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our
prominent statesmen maintains the unity of the colonial people,
adds indeed to their subjection to the same sovereign authority,
community of origin, of language, manners, customs, and law. All
these, except the last, or common law, may exist without national
unity in the modern political sense of the term nation. The
English common law was recognized by the colonial courts, and in
force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial legislation,
but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in English
jurisprudence. The colonists were under the Common Law, because
they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
This proves that they were really one people with the English
people, though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and
not a separate people having nothing politically in common with
them but in the accident of having the same royal person for
their king. The union with the mother country was national, not
personal, as was the union existing between England and Hanover,
or that still existing between the empire of Austria, formerly
Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary; and hence the British
parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right to tax the
colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in all
cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation
laws.
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