The differences between the colonies and the mother-country with respect to internal taxation slowly developed into an issue of constitutionalism rather than of legislative policy.

The immense productiveness of the soil in our western states, combined with cheapness of transportation, tends to affect seriously the agricultural interests of New England as well as those of our mother-country.

But he soon found that many of his countrymen had forgotten in America the principles of spiritual freedom, for which they had so nobly contended in England, and were ready to employ against those who differed from them, the same 'carnal weapons' that had already driven them from their mother-country.

The mother-country always considers the colonies, thus connected, as parts of itself; the prosperity or unhappiness of either, is the prosperity or unhappiness of both; not, perhaps, of both in the same degree, for the body may subsist, though less commodiously, without a limb, but the limb must perish, if it be parted from the body.

Their charters being now, I suppose, legally forfeited, may be modelled, as shall appear most commodious to the mother-country.

Thus the Government of the mother-country, without knowing it, confirmed freedom to those upon whom it had been bestowed by the commissioners.

Learned works have, of course, a superior reception in the mother-country; works of pure thought in the daughter.

Dissensions of this class place in strong relief the passions and tendencies which render the endurance of the political system which we have established here, and of the connection with the mother-country, uncertain and precarious.

Accustomed to look abroad for the source and centre of power, a beaten minority in the Colonial Parliament, instead of loyally accepting its position, was never without a hope of wresting the victory from its opponents, either by an appeal to opinion in the mother-country, always ill-informed, and therefore credulous, in matters of colonial politics, or else by raising a cry of 'separation' or 'annexation.'

I am sure also that when free-trade is fairly in operation it will be found that more has been gained by removing the causes of irritation which were furnished by the constant tinkering incident to a protective system, than has been lost by severing the bonds by which it tied the mother-country and the colonies together.

For though it may be true that the practice of defending the Colonies with the troops and at the cost of the mother-country was an innovation upon the earlier Colonial system, introduced at the time of the great war, it is not the less certain that to the generation of colonists that had grown up since that time the abandonment of it had all the effect of novelty.

They were equally free by law with the former, and paid their taxes to the mother-country in an equal proportion.

Thus not only is the literature of the constitutional mother-country democratic, but also the literature of France, otherwise so decidedly aristocratic: a majority dictates its laws to the distinguished individual and is inclined to ostracize him, if too headstrong, and exile him from the "Republic of Letters."

In the Northern United States, it is said, the active growth of most plants is condensed into ten weeks, while in the mother-country the full activity is maintained through sixteen.

The new-fangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would madden many a pedagogue, and shake down the roof of many a time-honored seat of learning, in the mother-country.

The immediate pretext was the passing of a law by the imperial Parliament for the regulation of prisons, which the House of Assembly declared a violation of that principle of their charter which forbids the mother-country to lay a tax on them without their consent, in as much as it authorized a crown officer to impose a fine, in a certain case, of £20.

Not until the years immediately preceding the revolutions by which the United States and Cuba secured their independence, was there any general demand for definite separation from the mother-country.

He does not like deathhe dreads the thought of itbut without questioning his soul he springs forward to save this mother-country of his and dies upon her bosom with a cry of "Vive la France!" 2 The French soldier, whatever his coarseness or his delicacy, needs feminine consolation, and all his ideals and his yearnings and his self- pity are intimately associated with the love of women, and especially of one womanhis mother.

[Illustration: Champlain190] M. de Monts and his comrades had been for many years struggling against the natural difficulties of their enterprise, and against the ill-will or indifference which they encountered in the mother-country; religious zeal was reviving in France; the edict of Nantes had put a stop to violent strife; missionary ardor animated the powerful society of Jesuits especially.

"Between 1767 and 1771 patriotic leagues were everywhere formed against the consumption of English merchandise and the exportation of American produce; all exchange ceased between the mother-country and the colonies.

In view of these, Colonel Barre might truly say in the House of Commons, that, in this riot, "Boston was only mimicking the mother-country.

He was in the habit of saying that nothing which he had done would bring troops into the town,that he was desirous of promoting harmony between the Province and the mother-country,and the memorial to the Ministry in their behalf contained the assurance that they bore "the same sentiments of loyalty and duty towards their gracious King, and the same reverence for the great council of the nation, the British Parliament, as ever."

"It cannot be wondered at," said "Determinatus," (August 8,) in the "Gazette," "if the mother-country should think that we are in a state of confusion equal to what we hear from the orderly and very polite cities of London and Westminster.

OTIS, JAMES, American lawyer, born in Massachusetts, distinguished as a ringleader in the revolution in the colonies against the mother-country that led to American independence, for which he had to pay with his life and the prior loss of his reason (1724-1783).

It would appear that, taking a series of years, about three-quarters of the Colony's trade has been with the mother-country, and nearly all the remainder with other parts of the Empire.