weighed those challenges before he delivered them. I had long the happiness to sit at the same side of the House, and to agree with the Honorable Gentleman on all the American questions. My sentiments, I am sure, are well known to him; and I thought I had been perfectly acquainted with his. Though I find myself mistaken, he will still permit me to use the privilege of an old friendship; he will permit me to apply myself to the House under the sanction of his authority; and, on the various grounds he has measured out, to submit to you the poor opinions which I have formed upon a matter of importance enough to demand the fullest consideration I could bestow upon it.

3. He has stated to the House two grounds. of deliberation; one narrow and simple, and merely confined to the question on your paper: the other more large and more complicated; comprehending the whole series of the Parliamentary proceedings with regard to the latter ground, he states it as useless, and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter into so extensive a field of inquiry. Yet, to my surprise, he had hardly laid down this restrictive proposition, to which his authority would have given so much weight, when directly, and with the same authority, he condemns it; and declares it absolutely necessary to enter into the most ample historical detail.5 His zeal has thrown him a little out of his usual accuracy. In this perplexity what shall we do, Sir, who are willing to submit to the law he gives us? He has reprobated in one part of his speech the rule he had laid down for debate in the other; and, after narrowing the ground for all those who are to speak after him, he takes an excursion himself, as unbounded as the subject and the extent of his great abilities.

4. Sir, When I cannot obey all his laws, I will do the best I can. I will endeavor to obey such of them as have the

4. At the same side.-Cornwall was a renegade from Lord Shelburne's party, and had spoken with effect on the side of the opposition in the debates on the American question.

5. Historical detail.-It is to this demand of Cornwall that we are indebted for the second part of this speech-the history of American taxation-one of the most interesting passages in English literature.

dependencies. They never had any kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties, into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piece-meal a repeal of an act, which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.

15. Do you forget that, in the very last year, you stood on the precipice of general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were distressed in the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger, which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly 15 of the most lucrative trades, and the possession of imperial revenues, had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin.16 Such was your representation-such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten millions of pounds 1 of this commodity, now locked up

15. Monopoly.-The whole commerce of the East with Great Britain was in the hands of the company.

16. Verge af beggary and ruin.-The Company had agreed to the payment of £400,000, per annum to government. But in 1772, while many of their servants had returned to England with large fortunes, the Company became so involved in difficulties as not only to be unable to pay this sum, but to make it necessary that £1,400,000, should be advanced to them by the public. The exhaustion of the country, and the expenses incurred in the war with Hyder Ali and France, involved the Company in fresh difficulties; and they were obliged, in 1783, to present a petition to Parliament, setting forth their inability to pay their annual sum of £400,000., praying to be excused therefrom, and to be supported by a loan of £900,000. At this criis Fox brought in his India Bill, on which Burke made one of the most memorable of his speeches, the last but one of the five parliamentary orations which he gave to the world through the press.

17. Ten millions of pounds.-In 1772 official reports showed that the warehouses of the Company contained 16,000,000 pounds of tea.

by the operation of an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses 18 of the Company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate measures which you thought yourself obliged to take in consequence of it. America would have furnished that vent, which no other part of the world can furnish but America; where tea is next to a necessary of life; and where the demand grows upon the supply.

16. I hope our dear-bought East India committees have done us at least so much good, as to let us know, that, without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They are ponderous indeed: and they must have that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors to contraband; and will be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble. It must be given up. For on what principles does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance-a preambulary tax. It is indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers, or satisfaction to the subject.

17. Well! but whatever it is, gentlemen will force the Colonists to take the teas. You will force them? Has seven years' struggle yet been able to force them? O but it seems, 'We are in the right. The tax is trifling-in fact it is rather an exoneration than an imposition; three-fourths of the

18. Rotting in the warehouses.-The absurd regulations which made it necessary for the Company to keep a year's supply of tea in their warehouses, helped to raise its price and spoil its quality.

duty formerly payable on teas exported to America is taken off; the place of collection is only shifted; instead of the retention of a shilling from the draw-back 19 here, it is threepence custom paid in America.' All this, Sir, is very true. But this is the very folly and mischief of the act. Incredible as it may seem, you know that you have deliberately thrown away a large duty which you held secure and quiet in your hands, for the vain hope of getting one three-fourths less, through every hazard, through certain litigation,20 and possibly through war.

18. Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America, than to see you go out of the plain high-road of finance, and give up your most certain revenues and your clearest interests, merely for the sake of insulting your Colonies? No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of three-pence. But no commodity will bear three-pence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated, and two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The feelings of the Colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden" when called upon for the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble, of which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty, that the Americans are unable and unwilling to bear.

19. It is then, Sir, upon the principle of this measure, and nothing else, that we are at issue. It is a principle of politi

19. Drawback.-Drawbacks were given upon two different occasions. When the home manufactures were subject to any duty or excise, either the whole or a part of it was frequently drawn back upon their exportation; and when foreign goods liable to a duty were imported in order to be exported again, either the whole or a part of this duty was sometimes given back upon such exportation.-Smith's Wealth of Nations, book iv. ch. i.

20. Certain litigation.-In the general sense of quarreling, not in the special and more common one, of proceeding at law.

21. Hampden.-Reference is made to the patriot John Hampden (1594-1643). The refusal of this celebrated man to pay "ship money" when illegally demanded by Charles I., is known to every student of history. Consult Macaulay's Essay on Hampden,

cal expediency. Your Act of 1767 asserts, that it is expedient to raise a revenue in America; your Act of 1769, which · takes away that revenue, contradicts the Act of 1767; and, by something much stronger than words, asserts, that it is not expedient. It is a reflection upon your wisdom to persist in a solemn Parliementary declaration of the expediency of any object, for which, at the same time, you make no sort of provision. And pray, Sir, let not this circumstance escape you; it is very material; that the preamble of this act, which we wish to repeal, is not declaratory of a right, as some gentlemen seem to argue it; it is only a recital of the expediency of a certain exercise of a right supposed already to have been asserted; an exercise you are now contending for by ways and means, which you confess, though they were obeyed, to be utterly insufficient for their purpose. You are therefore at this moment in the awkward situation of fighting for a phantom; a quiddity; a thing that wants, not only a substance, but even a name; for a thing, which is neither abstract right, nor profitable enjoyment.

20. They tell you, Sir, that your dignity is tied to it. I know not how it happens, but this dignity of yours is a terrible incumbrance to you; for it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity, and every idea of your policy. Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful end; and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please. But what dignity is derived from the perseverance in absurdity, is more than ever I could discern. The Honorable Gentleman has said well-indeed, in most of his general observations I agree with him-he says, that this subject does not stand as it did formerly. Oh, certainly not! Every hour you continue on this ill-chosen ground, your difficulties thicken on you; and therefore my conclusion is, remove from a bad position as quickly as you can. The disgrace, and the necessity of yielding, both of them, grow upon you every hour of your delay.

21. Sir, the Honorable Gentleman having spoken what he thought necessary upon the narrow part of the subject,