The fact is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.
Burke asserts that the colonists interpreted England's governance as affirming their shared principles.
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More from Edmund Burke
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.
The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.
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