The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.