Most of all it should be remembered that, though subject to the Navigation laws imposed by the mother country and to that extent restricted in their commercial dealings, no English colony in North America, before the days of the Stamp Act, had ever been taxed by Crown or Parliament for revenue purposes. In the year 1758 Montcalm was supposed to have written on this subject in the following terms: ‘As to the English colonies, one essential point should be known, it is that they are never taxed. They keep that to themselves, an enormous fault this in the policy of the mother country. She should have taxed them from the foundation. I have certain advice that all the colonies would take fire at being taxed now.’[20] This judgement was probably sound. It might have been well if from the first, when charters were issued and colonial communities were formed, some small tax had been levied for Imperial purposes upon the British colonies, if some contribution of only nominal amount had been exacted as a condition of retaining British citizenship. There would then have been a precedent, such as Englishmen always try to find, and there would have been in existence a reminder that all members of a family should contribute to the household expenses.[21] [Sidenote: The political separation of the North American colonies was the natural result of their geographical separation.] We are accustomed to think and to read of the separation of the American colonies from the mother country as wholly an abnormal incident, the result of bad handiwork, not the outcome of natural forces. This view is incorrect. History ultimately depends on geography. When two members of the same race, nation, or family pass their lives at a long distance from each other, in different lands, in different climates, under different conditions, the natural and inevitable result is that they diverge from each other. The centrifugal tendency may be counteracted by tact and clever statesmanship, and still more by sense of common danger; but it is a natural tendency. Men cannot live at a distance from each other without becoming to some extent estranged. The Greeks, with their instinctive love of logic and of symmetry, and with their fundamental conception of a city as the political unit, looked on colonization as separation, and called a colony a departure from home. The colonists carried with them reverence for the mother state, but not dependence upon it; and, if there was any political bond, it was embodied in the words that those who went out went out on terms of equality with, not of subordination to, those who remained behind. The English, in fact, though not in principle, planted colonies on the model of the Greek settlements; their theories and their practice collided; and, being a practical race, their theories eventually went by the board. [Sidenote: Conflicting tendencies. Distance and sentiment.] [Sidenote: στάσις and colonization.]