Sir,--It is not a pleasant consideration; but nothing in the world can
read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of the Ministry
in this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal
ideas in the management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the
State looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected
view. They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and
one pretense and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort
of regard to their relations or 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
piecemeal 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 Threepence 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.
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
of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues
had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation--such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of the company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves 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. 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....
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 threepence. But no commodity will bear
threepence, 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.
It is then, sir, upon the _principle_ of this measure, and nothing else,
that we are at issue. It is a principle of political 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
Parliamentary 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.
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....
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted as
ours, is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble the
flights of the highest genius and obtain pardon for the efforts of the
meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by
degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived at length some confidence
from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less
anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of
what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would
not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its
reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of
all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure that
if my proposition were futile or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived
or improperly timed, there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe,
dazzle, or delude you. You will see it just as it is; and you will treat
it just as it deserves.
The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not
Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless
negotiations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from
principle in all parts of the empire; not Peace to depend on the
juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking
of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple Peace,
sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is Peace
sought in the spirit of Peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I
propose by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the
_former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country_,
to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of
ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act and
by the bond of the very same interest which reconciles them to British
government.
My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of
confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good
intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is
surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the
government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is an healing and
cementing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the most
simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some people when they hear it.
It has nothing to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There
is nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the
splendor of the project which has been lately laid upon your table by
the noble lord in the blue ribbon. It does not propose to fill your
lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition
of your mace at every instant to keep the peace amongst them. It does
not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated
provinces come to general ransom by bidding against each other, until
you knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of payments beyond
all the powers of algebra to equalize and settle.
The plan which I shall presume to suggest derives, however, one
great advantage from the proposition and registry of that noble
lord's project. The idea of conciliation is admissible. First, the
House, in accepting the resolution moved by the noble lord, has
admitted--notwithstanding the menacing front of our address,
notwithstanding our heavy bills of pains and penalties--that we do not
think ourselves precluded from all ideas of free grace and bounty.
The House has gone further: it has declared conciliation admissible,
_previous_ to any submission on the part of America. It has even shot a
good deal beyond that mark, and has admitted that the complaints of our
former mode of exerting the right of taxation were not wholly unfounded.
That right, thus exerted, is allowed to have something reprehensible in
it--something unwise, or something grievous: since in the midst of our
heat and resentment we of ourselves have proposed a capital alteration,
and in order to get rid of what seemed so very exceptionable have
instituted a mode that is altogether new; one that is indeed wholly
alien from all the ancient methods and forms of Parliament.
The _principle_ of this proceeding is large enough for my purpose. The
means proposed by the noble lord for carrying his ideas into execution,
I think indeed are very indifferently suited to the end; and this I
shall endeavor to show you before I sit down. But for the present I take
my ground on the admitted principle. I mean to give peace. Peace implies
reconciliation; and where there has been a material dispute,
reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession on the one part
or on the other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in
affirming that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and
acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by
an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace
with honor and safety. Such an offer from such a power will be
attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions of the weak are the
concessions of fear. When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the
mercy of his superior, and he loses forever that time and those chances
which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all
inferior power.
The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide are
these two: First, whether you ought to concede; and secondly, what your
concession ought to be. On the first of these questions we have gained
(as I have just taken the liberty of observing to you) some ground. But
I am sensible that a good deal more is still to be done. Indeed, sir, to
enable us to determine both on the one and the other of these great
questions with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary
to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of
the object which we have before us. Because after all our struggle,
whether we will or not, we must govern America according to that nature
and to those circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations
nor according to abstract ideas of right; by no means according to mere
general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in
our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore
endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material
of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am able to
state them.