three more; but they come rather too near detail, and to the province of
executive government, which I wish Parliament always to superintend,
never to assume. If the first six are granted, congruity will carry the
latter three. If not, the things that remain unrepealed will be, I hope,
rather unseemly incumbrances on the building than very materially
detrimental to its strength and stability.
Here, Sir, I should close, but that I plainly perceive some objections
remain, which I ought, if possible, to remove. The first will be, that,
in resorting to the doctrine of our ancestors, as contained in the
preamble to the Chester act, I prove too much: that the grievance from a
want of representation, stated in that preamble, goes to the whole of
legislation as well as to taxation; and that the colonies, grounding
themselves upon that doctrine, will apply it to all parts of legislative
authority.
To this objection, with all possible deference and humility, and wishing
as little as any man living to impair the smallest particle of our
supreme authority, I answer, that _the words are the words of
Parliament, and not mine_; and that all false and inconclusive
inferences drawn from them are not mine; for I heartily disclaim any
such inference. I have chosen the words of an act of Parliament, which
Mr. Grenville, surely a tolerably zealous and very judicious advocate
for the sovereignty of Parliament, formerly moved to have read at your
table in confirmation of his tenets. It is true that Lord Chatham
considered these preambles as declaring strongly in favor of his
opinions. He was a no less powerful advocate for the privileges of the
Americans. Ought I not from hence to presume that these preambles are as
favorable as possible to both, when properly understood: favorable both
to the rights of Parliament, and to the privilege of the dependencies of
this crown? But, Sir, the object of grievance in my resolution I have
not taken from the Chester, but from the Durham act, which confines the
hardship of want of representation to the case of subsidies, and which
therefore falls in exactly with the case of the colonies. But whether
the unrepresented counties were _de jure_ or _de facto_ bound the
preambles do not accurately distinguish; nor, indeed, was it necessary:
for, whether _de jure_ or _de facto_, the legislature thought the
exercise of the power of taxing, as of right, or as of fact without
right, equally a grievance, and equally oppressive.
I do not know that the colonies have, in any general way, or in any cool
hour, gone much beyond the demand of immunity in relation to taxes. It
is not fair to judge of the temper or dispositions of any man or any set
of men, when they are composed and at rest, from their conduct or their
expressions in a state of disturbance and irritation. It is, besides, a
very great mistake to imagine that mankind follow up practically any
speculative principle, either of government or of freedom, as far as it
will go in argument and logical illation. We Englishmen stop very short
of the principles upon which we support any given part of our
Constitution, or even the whole of it together. I could easily, if I had
not already tired you, give you very striking and convincing instances
of it. This is nothing but what is natural and proper. All government,
indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent
act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we
give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we
choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants. As we must
give away some natural liberty, to enjoy civil advantages, so we must
sacrifice some civil liberties, for the advantages to be derived from
the communion and fellowship of a great empire. But, in all fair
dealings, the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase
paid. None will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul. Though a
great house is apt to make slaves haughty, yet it is purchasing a part
of the artificial importance of a great empire too dear, to pay for it
all essential rights, and all the intrinsic dignity of human nature.
None of us who would not risk his life rather than fall under a
government purely arbitrary. But although there are some amongst us who
think our Constitution wants many improvements to make it a complete
system of liberty, perhaps none who are of that opinion would think it
right to aim at such improvement by disturbing his country and risking
everything that is dear to him. In every arduous enterprise, we consider
what we are to lose, as well as what we are to gain; and the more and
better stake of liberty every people possess, the less they will hazard
in a vain attempt to make it more. These are _the cords of man_. Man
acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on
metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning,
cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species
of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most
fallacious of all sophistry.
The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory
of England, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it; and they
will rather be inclined to respect the acts of a superintending
legislature, when they see them the acts of that power which is itself
the security, not the rival, of their secondary importance. In this
assurance my mind most perfectly acquiesces, and I confess I feel not
the least alarm from the discontents which are to arise from putting
people at their ease; nor do I apprehend the destruction of this empire
from giving, by an act of free grace and indulgence, to two millions of
my fellow-citizens some share of those rights upon which I have always
been taught to value myself.
It is said, indeed, that this power of granting, vested in American
assemblies, would dissolve the unity of the empire,--which was preserved
entire, although Wales, and Chester, and Durham were added to it. Truly,
Mr. Speaker, I do not know what this unity means; nor has it ever been
heard of, that I know, in the constitutional policy of this country. The
very idea of subordination of parts excludes this notion of simple and
undivided unity. England is the head; but she is not the head and the
members too. Ireland has ever had from the beginning a separate, but not
an independent legislature, which, far from distracting, promoted the
union of the whole. Everything was sweetly and harmoniously disposed
through both islands for the conservation of English dominion and the
communication of English liberties. I do not see that the same
principles might not be carried into twenty islands, and with the same
good effect. This is my model with regard to America, as far as the
internal circumstances of the two countries are the same. I know no
other unity of this empire than I can draw from its example during these
periods, when it seemed to my poor understanding more united than it is
now, or than it is likely to be by the present methods.
But since I speak of these methods, I recollect, Mr. Speaker, almost too
late, that I promised, before I finished, to say something of the
proposition of the noble lord[29] on the floor, which has been so lately
received, and stands on your journals. I must be deeply concerned,
whenever it is my misfortune to continue a difference with the majority
of this House. But as the reasons for that difference are my apology for
thus troubling you, suffer me to state them in a very few words. I shall
compress them into as small a body as I possibly can, having already
debated that matter at large, when the question was before the
committee.
First, then, I cannot admit that proposition of a ransom by
auction,--because it is a mere project. It is a thing new, unheard of,
supported by no experience, justified by no analogy, without example of
our ancestors, or root in the Constitution. It is neither regular
Parliamentary taxation nor colony grant. _Experimentum in corpore vili_
is a good rule, which will ever make me adverse to any trial of
experiments on what is certainly the most valuable of all subjects, the
peace of this empire.
Secondly, it is an experiment which must be fatal in the end to our
Constitution. For what is it but a scheme for taxing the colonies in the
antechamber of the noble lord and his successors? To settle the quotas
and proportions in this House is clearly impossible. You, Sir, may
flatter yourself you shall sit a state auctioneer, with your hammer in
your hand, and knock down to each colony as it bids. But to settle (on
the plan laid down by the noble lord) the true proportional payment for
four or five and twenty governments, according to the absolute and the
relative wealth of each, and according to the British proportion of
wealth and burden, is a wild and chimerical notion. This new taxation
must therefore come in by the back-door of the Constitution. Each quota
must be brought to this House ready formed. You can neither add nor
alter. You must register it. You can do nothing further. For on what
grounds can you deliberate either before or after the proposition? You
cannot hear the counsel for all these provinces, quarrelling each on its
own quantity of payment, and its proportion to others. If you should
attempt it, the Committee of Provincial Ways and Means, or by whatever
other name it will delight to be called, must swallow up all the time of
Parliament.
Thirdly, it does not give satisfaction to the complaint of the colonies.
They complain that they are taxed without their consent. You answer,
that you will fix the sum at which they shall be taxed. That is, you
give them the very grievance for the remedy. You tell them, indeed,
that you will leave the mode to themselves. I really beg pardon; it
gives me pain to mention it; but you must be sensible that you will not
perform this part of the compact. For suppose the colonies were to lay
the duties which furnished their contingent upon the importation of your
manufactures; you know you would never suffer such a tax to be laid. You
know, too, that you would not suffer many other modes of taxation. So
that, when you come to explain yourself, it will be found that you will
neither leave to themselves the quantum nor the mode, nor indeed
anything. The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.
Fourthly, this method of ransom by auction, unless it be _universally_
accepted, will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties. In
what year of our Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled? To
say nothing of the impossibility that colony agents should have general
powers of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore
you, that the communication by special messages and orders between these
agents and their constituents on each variation of the case, when the
parties come to contend together, and to dispute on their relative
proportions, will be a matter of delay, perplexity, and confusion, that
never can have an end.
If all the colonies do not appear at the outcry, what is the condition
of those assemblies who offer, by themselves or their agents, to tax
themselves up to your ideas of their proportion? The refractory
colonies, who refuse all composition, will remain taxed only to your old
impositions, which, however grievous in principle, are trifling as to
production. The obedient colonies in this scheme are heavily taxed; the
refractory remain unburdened. What will you do? Will you lay new and
heavier taxes by Parliament on the disobedient? Pray consider in what
way you can do it. You are perfectly convinced, that, in the way of
taxing, you can do nothing but at the ports. Now suppose it is Virginia
that refuses to appear at your auction, while Maryland and North
Carolina bid handsomely for their ransom, and are taxed to your quota,
how will you put these colonies on a par? Will you tax the tobacco of
Virginia? If you do, you give its death-wound to your English revenue at
home, and to one of the very greatest articles of your own foreign
trade. If you tax the import of that rebellious colony, what do you tax
but your own manufactures, or the goods of some other obedient and
already well-taxed colony? Who has said one word on this labyrinth of
detail, which bewilders you more and more as you enter into it? Who has
presented, who can present, you with a clew to lead you out of it? I
think, Sir, it is impossible that you should not recollect that the
colony bounds are so implicated in one another (you know it by your
other experiments in the bill for prohibiting the New England fishery)
that you can lay no possible restraints on almost any of them which may
not be presently eluded, if you do not confound the innocent with the
guilty, and burden those whom upon every principle you ought to
exonerate. He must be grossly ignorant of America, who thinks, that,
without falling into this confusion of all rules of equity and policy,
you can restrain any single colony, especially Virginia and Maryland,
the central, and most important of them all.
Let it also be considered, that either in the present confusion you
settle a permanent contingent, which will and must be trifling, and
then you have no effectual revenue,--or you change the quota at every
exigency, and then on every new repartition you will have a new quarrel.
Reflect besides, that, when you have fixed a quota for every colony, you
have not provided for prompt and punctual payment. Suppose one, two,
five, ten years' arrears. You cannot issue a Treasury extent against the
failing colony. You must make new Boston port bills, new restraining
laws, new acts for dragging men to England for trial. You must send out
new fleets, new armies. All is to begin again. From this day forward the
empire is never to know an hour's tranquillity. An intestine fire will
be kept alive in the bowels of the colonies, which one time or other
must consume this whole empire. I allow, indeed, that the Empire of
Germany raises her revenue and her troops by quotas and contingents; but
the revenue of the Empire and the army of the Empire is the worst
revenue and the worst army in the world.
Instead of a standing revenue, you will therefore have a perpetual
quarrel. Indeed, the noble lord who proposed this project of a ransom by
auction seemed himself to be of that opinion. His project was rather
designed for breaking the union of the colonies than for establishing a
revenue. He confessed he apprehended that his proposal would not be to
_their taste_. I say, this scheme of disunion seems to be at the bottom
of the project; for I will not suspect that the noble lord meant nothing
but merely to delude the nation by an airy phantom which he never
intended to realize. But whatever his views may be, as I propose the
peace and union of the colonies as the very foundation of my plan, it
cannot accord with one whose foundation is perpetual discord.
Compare the two. This I offer to give you is plain and simple: the other
full of perplexed and intricate mazes. This is mild: that harsh. This is
found by experience effectual for its purposes: the other is a new
project. This is universal: the other calculated for certain colonies
only. This is immediate in its conciliatory operation: the other remote,
contingent, full of hazard. Mine is what becomes the dignity of a ruling
people: gratuitous, unconditional, and not held out as matter of bargain
and sale. I have done my duty in proposing it to you. I have, indeed,
tired you by a long discourse; but this is the misfortune of those to
whose influence nothing will be conceded, and who must win every inch of
their ground by argument. You have heard me with goodness. May you
decide with wisdom! For my part, I feel my mind greatly disburdened by
what I have done to-day. I have been the less fearful of trying your
patience, because on this subject I mean to spare it altogether in
future. I have this comfort,--that, in every stage of the American
affairs, I have steadily opposed the measures that have produced the
confusion, and may bring on the destruction, of this empire. I now go so
far as to risk a proposal of my own. If I cannot give peace to my
country, I give it to my conscience.
But what (says the financier) is peace to us without money? Your plan
gives us no revenue.--No! But it does: for it secures to the subject the
power of REFUSAL,--the first of all revenues. Experience is a cheat, and
fact a liar, if this power in the subject, of proportioning his grant,
or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine of
revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man. It does
not, indeed, vote you £152,750: 11: 2-3/4ths, nor any other paltry
limited sum; but it gives the strong-box itself, the fund, the bank,
from whence only revenues can arise amongst a people sensible of
freedom: _Posita luditur arca_. Cannot you in England, cannot you at
this time of day, cannot you, an House of Commons, trust to the
principle which has raised so mighty a revenue, and accumulated a debt
of near 140 millions in this country? Is this principle to be true in
England and false everywhere else? Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not
hitherto been true in the colonies? Why should you presume, that, in any
country, a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to
perform its duty, and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption would go
against all government in all modes. But, in truth, this dread of penury
of supply from a free assembly has no foundation in Nature. For first,
observe, that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of
supporting the honor of their own government, that sense of dignity, and
that security to property, which ever attends freedom, has a tendency to
increase the stock of the free community. Most may be taken where most
is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not
uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting
from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, has ever run with a more
copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of
oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the
world?
Next, we know that parties must ever exist in a free country. We know,
too, that the emulations of such parties, their contradictions, their
reciprocal necessities, their hopes, and their fears, must send them all
in their turns to him that holds the balance of the state. The parties
are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the
winner in the end. When this game is played, I really think it is more
to be feared that the people will be exhausted than that government will
not be supplied. Whereas whatever is got by acts of absolute power ill
obeyed because odious, or by contracts ill kept because constrained,
will be narrow, feeble, uncertain, and precarious.
"Ease would retract
Vows made in pain, as violent and void."
I, for one, protest against compounding our demands: I declare against
compounding, for a poor limited sum, the immense, ever-growing, eternal
debt which is due to generous government from protected freedom. And so
may I speed in the great object I propose to you, as I think it would
not only be an act of injustice, but would be the worst economy in the
world, to compel the colonies to a sum certain, either in the way of
ransom, or in the way of compulsory compact.
But to clear up my ideas on this subject,--a revenue from America
transmitted hither. Do not delude yourselves: you can never receive
it,--no, not a shilling. We have experience that from remote countries
it is not to be expected. If, when you attempted to extract revenue from
Bengal, you were obliged to return in loan what you had taken in
imposition, what can you expect from North America? For, certainly, if
ever there was a country qualified to produce wealth, it is India; or an
institution fit for the transmission, it is the East India Company.
America has none of these aptitudes. If America gives you taxable
objects on which you lay your duties here, and gives you at the same
time a surplus by a foreign sale of her commodities to pay the duties on
these objects which you tax at home, she has performed her part to the
British revenue. But with regard to her own internal establishments, she
may, I doubt not she will, contribute in moderation. I say in
moderation; for she ought not to be permitted to exhaust herself. She
ought to be reserved to a war; the weight of which, with the enemies
that we are most likely to have, must be considerable in her quarter of
the globe. There she may serve you, and serve you essentially.
For that service, for all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire,
my trust is in her interest in the British Constitution. My hold of the
colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from
kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are
ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the
colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your
government,--they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under
heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. 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 everything
hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep
the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the
sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race
and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards
you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more
ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.
Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until
you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural
dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity
of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true Act of
Navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the colonies, and through
them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this
participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally
made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain
so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your
affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are
what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your
letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses
are the things that hold together the great contexture of this
mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead
instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English
communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the
spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the mighty
mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the
empire, even down to the minutest member.
Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England?
Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land-Tax Act which raises your
revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which
gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it
with bravery and discipline? No! surely, no! It is the love of the
people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of
the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you
your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience
without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but
rotten timber.