[Illustration: The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt (Lord Chatham), with One Leg in London and the Other in New York. (London, 1766.)] His twenty "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One," published three years before the caricature, inculcated the same lesson. A great empire, he remarked, was in one particular like a great cake: it could be most easily diminished at _the edges_. The person, therefore, who had undertaken the task of reducing it should take care to begin at the remotest provinces, and not till after they were lopped off cut up the central portion. His twenty "Rules" are merely a humorous history of the British colonial policy since the accession of George III.: Don't incorporate your colonies with the mother country, quarter troops among them, appoint for their governors broken gamblers and exhausted _roués_, despise their voluntary grants, and harass them with novel taxes. By such measures as these "you will act like a wise gingerbread baker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through at the places where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces." Franklin also wrote a shorter burlesque, pompously headed, "An Edict of the King of Prussia," in which that monarch was supposed to claim sovereign rights over Great Britain on the ground that the island had been colonized by Hengist, Horsa, and others, subjects of "our renowned ducal ancestors." The edict, of course, ordains and commands precisely those absurd things which the Government of Great Britain _had_ ordained and commanded since the planting of the colonies. Iron, as the edict duly sets forth, had been discovered in the island of Great Britain by "our colonists there," who, "_presuming_ that they had a natural right to make the best use they could of the natural productions of their country," had erected furnaces and forges for the manufacture of the same, to the detriment of the manufacturers of Prussia. This must be instantly stopped, and all the iron sent to Prussia to be manufactured. "And whereas the art and mystery of making _hats_ has arrived at great perfection in Prussia," and "the islanders before mentioned, being in possession of wool, beaver, and other furs, have presumptuously conceived they had a right to take some advantage thereof by manufacturing the same into hats, to the prejudice of our domestic manufacture," therefore we do hereby forbid them to do so any more. We call this piece a burlesque, but it was burlesque only in form. Precisely such restrictions existed upon the industry of the American colonists. It was part of the protective system of the age, and not much more unjust than the parts of the same system to which the descendants of those colonists have since subjected themselves.