It was a stern and severe lesson; and yet, fraught with discredit and disaster as it was, it nevertheless bore fruit in a later age which we may be excused for regarding as an example of the generally predominating influence of sober practical sense in our countrymen, when not led away by the temporary excitement of passion, as shown in our capacity to take home to ourselves and profit by the teachings of experience.

The loss of the American Colonies was caused by the submission of the Parliament and nation to men of theory rather than of practice; ideologists, as Napoleon called them; doctrinaires, to use the modern expression; men who, because Parliament had an abstract right of universal legislation, regarded it as a full justification for insisting on its exercise, without giving a thought to the feelings, or prejudices, or habits of those who might be affected by their measures.

Abstractedly considered, Lord Chatham and Lord Camden were undoubtedly wrong in denying the power of Parliament to tax the Colonies; but there was better judgment in their counsels, though founded on false premises, than in those of Grenville and Townsend, though theirs was the more correct view of the constitutional power of legislation.

The two peers were wrong in their principle; the two Chancellors of the Exchequer were unwise in their application of their principle; and the practical error was the more disastrous one.
It is now generally admitted that the true statesman-like course toward the Colonies was that adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues in 1765--to avoid weakening the supreme power of Parliament by any disavowal of the right to tax but to avoid imperilling the sovereign authority of the King by a novel exertion of it.

As much of our common English law is made up of precedent, so, in a still greater degree, are our feelings and ideas of our rights and privileges regulated by precedent.