By the 17th century, British citizens, for economic reasons or for religious oppression, flocked toward the New World to begin a community that honored their natural laws. Some flocked towards present day New England in order to obtain religious freedom while others left for the Chesapeake Bay to reap economic rewards, but Britain perceived the colonization of the New World as an addition to imperialism. These differentiating reasons for settlement eventually lead the colonists to revolution. As the colonials laid down the foundations for their new society, benign neglect, brought forth by the British, allowed the colonies to establish their own method of rule, including freedom of religion and their own government system which, over a long period of time, developed a sense of nationalism in the minds of many colonists. After virtually uninterrupted self rule, the colonials' natural rights were usurped by the British in order to make up for a massive debt that Britain had acquired during the French and Indian War. In The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson states, "This history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation, all having in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. Due to the invasion of the colonists' natural rights by economic taxation and political intervention, the excerpt by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence is valid.
             "To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind"(Kennedy 123). Adam Smith, the "father of modern economics", virulently stated his view on British mercantilism. Mercantilism, an economic system in which a nation could gain power and wealth by exportin...