As a general rule, revolutions in states are the results of isolated rebellions; and rebellions have their birth in desires to cast off evils inflicted by actual oppressions. These evils generally consist of the interferences of rulers with the physical well-being of the governed; and very few of the political changes in empires which so prominently mark the course of human history, have had a higher incentive to resistance than the maintenance of creature comforts. Abridgment of personal liberty in the exercise of natural rights, excessive taxation, and extortion of public officers, whereby individual competence and consequent ease have not been attainable, these have generally been the chief counts in the indictment, when the people have arisen in their might and arraigned their rulers at the bar of the world's judgment. The American Revolution, which succeeded local rebellions in the various provinces, was an exception to a general rule. History furnishes no parallel example of a people free, prosperous, and happy, rising from the couch of ease to gird on the panoply of war, with a certainty of encountering perhaps years of privation and distress, to combat the intangible _principle_ of despotism. The taxes of which the English colonies in America complained, and which were the ostensible cause of dissatisfaction, were almost nominal, and only in the smallest degree affected the general prosperity of the people. But the method employed in levying those slight taxes, and the prerogatives assumed by the king and his ministers, plainly revealed the _principles_ of tyranny, and were the causes which produced the quarrel. In these assumptions the kernel of despotism was very apparent, and the sagacious Americans, accustomed to vigorous and independent thought, and a free interchange of opinions, foresaw the speedy springing of that germ into the bulk and vigor of an umbrageous tree, that would overshadow the land and bear the bitter fruit of tyrannous misrule. Foreseeing this, they resolved neither to water it kindly, nor generously dig about its roots and open them to the genial influences of the blessed sun and the dews; but, on the contrary, to eradicate it. Tyranny had no abiding-place in America when the quarrel with the imperial government began, and the War of the Revolution, in its inception and progress, was eminently a war of principle.