What moved him was the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom.

He never concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the maintenance of English liberties.

"Armies," he said many years later, "first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special desire.

"In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous _Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character of the American contest.

His own receipt was sounder.