A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings. Noah Webster

claims. The insurgents took wrong steps to obtain redress; they should have rested their agrievances on petitions, and the event of an election; but one rash step leads to a second, and to a third. These fatal effects of popular discontent afford one useful lesson, that rulers should not attempt to carry a measure against the general voice of a people.35 But a question will arise, how far may the people be opposed, when their schemes are evidently pernicious? I answer, this can never happen thro design; and errors, even of the populace, may gradually be removed. If the people cannot be convinced, by reason and argument, of the impolicy or injustice of a favorite scheme, we have only to wait for the consequences to produce conviction. All people are not capable of just reasoning on the great scale of politics; but all can feel the inconveniencies of wrong measures, and evils of this kind generally furnish their own remedy. All popular Legislatures are liable to great mistakes. Many of the acts of the American Legislatures, respecting money and commerce, will, to future generations, appear incredible. After repeated experiments, people will be better informed, and astonished that their fathers could make such blunders in legislation.

      If the people of this State36 are not already convinced, they certainly will be, that the addition of 150,000l. of paper, to the current specie of the State, did not increase the permanent value of circulating medium a single farthing. They were perhaps told that such a sum of paper would shut up the specie, or enable the merchant to export it; but their jealousy made them believe these the suggestions of interest; and nothing but the experiment could satisfy their wishes. Every man of reflection must regret that he is subject to the evils consequent on popular mistakes in judgement; but this is the price of our independence and our forms of government.

      Let us attend to the immediate and necessary consequences of the American revolution.

      So great an event as that of detaching millions of people from their parent nation, could not have been effected without the operation of powerful causes. Nothing but a series of real or imaginary evils could have shaken the habits by which we were governed, and produced a combined opposition against the power of Great Britain. I shall not enumerate any of these evils; but observe that such evils, by twenty years operation upon the fears or feelings of the Americans, had alienated their affections or weakened those habits of respect, by which they were predisposed to voluntary obedience. When a government has lost respect, it has lost the main pillar of its authority. Not even a military force can supply the want of respect among subjects. A change of sentiment prepares the way for a change of government, and when that change of sentiment had become general in America, nothing could have prevented a revolution.