I thought we should take the time this weekend to recapitulate the events leading up to July 4th,

what led to the Declaration of Independence. To understand what happened in the years leading up to the

American Revolution, what we first have to understand is that the British Parliament saw a major

threat in the United States. The major threat was that the United States was growing so quickly

that it was quite possible that eventually the population of the United States would

outnumber the population inside Britain. And when that happened, the center of power within Great

Britain would actually be across the water, it would actually be in the United States, because

there'd be more British citizens living in the United States than there were living in Britain.

And so they could not allow there to be any sort of parliamentary representation for elected officials by the members of the American colonies.

It just wouldn't have been a possibility.

By the time of the revolution, there were about 2.5 million American citizens who are not slaves or Native Americans living in the United States.

The population of Britain at the time of the American Revolution

was about 8 million. That was the total population of Britain in 1775. So the fact that the United

States represented such a large number was quite threatening. It was the king making power,

essentially, or parliament-making power

in the American colonies that scared the bejeses out of the British Parliament. And so what you see

is from 1760s on, the beginning of the 1760s, Britain continuously attempting to use the colonies

as a sort of utter to milk for purposes of adventures abroad. Because remember, the British Empire,

the sun never set on it at the time. At the time of the American Revolution, the British Empire

spanned basically across the world. If you look at a map of the British Empire in 1776,

it's astonishing. It covers all of Canada. It covers a large swath of Africa. It covers Australia. It covers large swaths of India. It moves into some of the Asian islands. It's enormous. And those are constituents. If you're talking about places where the British had dominion, you're talking about

at that point nearly half of Africa, a large swath of the sub-Indian continent, and control of the

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