  Burke's thinking about America also suggests a political disposition that owed something to his philosophical conceptions. Burke's complaint in American Taxation against ministers was that ‘they have taken things…without any regard to their relations or dependencies’, and had ‘no one connected view.’ This was in part a straightforwardly cognitive position on which Burke laid an emphasis with prudential point: the world with which politicians dealt was complex, and to use ideas which were insufficiently complex to capture its contents and their relations was a short way to meet the rough side of reality. It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governments ought not to apply force to existing relations, at least those that were legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from natural jurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently with respect to inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property. In another, and more interesting way, it reflected his view that abstract compound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. To interfere forcibly with someone's experientially-based expectations would be to break their mental association between experience and idea or word: and so the idea or the word would become meaningless and cease to influence action. If, therefore, ‘my hold of the Colonies, is in the close affection which grows from common names’, amongst other sources that were ‘though light as air…as strong as links of iron’, then ‘let the Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your Government;—they will cling and grapple to you…But let it be once understood, that your Government may be one thing, and their Privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution.’ (CWA, W &amp; S 1981–2015, iii. 164). To break such mental associations was to break communities.