Rarely, indeed, would an appeal to England's best traditions have met with less cordial response among her rulers. For during the decade following the Peace of Paris the vision of liberty was half obscured by the vision of empire. Observant contemporaries noted the sudden rise of an insular egoism following the war that in Voltaire's phrase saw "England victorious in four parts of the world." Cowper was not alone in complaining "that thieves at home must hang, but he that puts into his over-gorged and bloated purse the wealth of Indian provinces, escapes"; and Horace Walpole has recorded in his incomparable letters, with a cynical and an engaging wit which reflects the spirit of the times better than his own sentiments, the corruption and prodigality, the levity and low aims of that generation. With many noble exceptions, the men who gathered round the young king, the men who "lived on their country or died for her," who too often admired if they could not always emulate the brutal degradation of a Sandwich or the matchless _abandon_ of the young Charles James Fox, had singularly little in common with those American communities which the Frenchman Ségur fancied "might have been made to order out of the imagination of Rousseau or Fénelon."
Had they known them better they would have liked them less; and in fact ten years' "discussion of the points in controversy only served to put farther asunder" men who reasoned from different premises and in a different temper. Englishmen were generally content with the fact of power registered in legal precedents; but Americans, profoundly convinced that they deserved to be free, were ever concerned with its moral justification. "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes ... on the cases of Manchester and ... Sheffield," cried James Otis. "If these places are not represented, _they ought to be_." This _ought_ is the fundamental premise of the entire colonial argument. "Shall we Proteus-like perpetually change our ground, assume every moment some new strange shape, to defend, to evade?" asks a Virginian in 1774. This was precisely what could not be avoided. For the end determined the means. If, therefore, the distinction between external and internal taxes was untenable, it convinced the American, not that Parliament had a right to tax the colonies, but only that it had no right to legislate for them. And when Englishmen grounded the legislative rights of Parliament upon the solid basis of positive law, the colonial patriot appealed with solemn fervor to natural law and the abstract rights of man. Little wonder that the more logical the American argument became the less intelligible it appeared to most Englishmen, and what seemed at last the very axioms of politics to the colonial radical struck the conservative British mind as the sophistry of men bent on revolution.