Smith would have liked the British Government to renounce its authority over the colonies, and so not only relieve the revenue from a serious annual drain, but at the same time convert the Americans from turbulent and fractious subjects to the most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies. But seeing that neither people nor government would brook such a mortification, he suggested that to save the situation they should try, by a scheme of union, to break up the American confederacy and reconstitute the empire on a fair basis. Let us give, he said, to each colony which will detach itself from the general confederacy a number of representatives in parliament proportionate to its contribution, and so open up a new and dazzling object of ambition to the leading men of each colony. If this or some other method were not fallen upon of conciliating the Americans, it was not probable that they would voluntarily submit, and “they are very weak who flatter themselves that, in the state to which things have come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone.” The leaders of the Congress had risen suddenly from tradesmen and attorneys to be statesmen and legislators of an extensive empire “which seems very likely to become one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” Nay, if the union he suggested as an alternative to peaceful and friendly parting were constituted, he predicted that in the course of little more than a century the empire would draw more revenue from America than from the mother country; and “the seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole.” It was such a scheme as this that Burke ridiculed when he pictured “a shipload of legislators” becalmed in mid-Atlantic.