CHAPTER III.

Mr. Grenville imposes a Duty on Stamps in the North American

Colonies.--Examination of Dr. Franklin.--Lord Rockingham's Ministry

Repeals the Duty.--Lord Mansfield affirms a Virtual Representation in

the Colonies.--Mr. C. Townsend imposes Import Duties in America.--After

some Years, the Civil War breaks out.--Hanoverian Troops are sent to

Gibraltar.--The Employment of Hanoverian Regiments at Gibraltar and

Minorca.--End of the War.--Colonial Policy of the Present

Reign.--Complaints of the Undue Influence of the Crown.--Motions for

Parliamentary Reform.--Mr. Burke's Bill for Economical Reform.--Mr.

Dunning's Resolution on the Influence of the Crown.--Rights of the Lords

on Money-bills.--The Gordon Riots.

But during these years another matter had been gradually forcing its way

to the front, which, though at first it attracted but comparatively

slight notice, when it came to a head, absorbed for several years the

whole attention, not only of these kingdoms, but of foreign countries

also. It was originally--in appearance, at least--merely a dispute

between Great Britain and her Colonies in North America on the mode of

obtaining a small revenue from them. But, in its progress, it eventually

involved us in a foreign war of great magnitude, and thus became the one

subject of supreme interest to every statesman in Europe. England had

not borne her share in the seven years' war without a considerable

augmentation of the national debt, and a corresponding increase in the

amount of yearly revenue which it had become necessary to raise;[33] and

Mr. Grenville, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had to devise the means

of meeting the demand. A year before, he had supported with great warmth

the proposal of Sir Francis Dashwood, his predecessor at the Exchequer,

to lay a new tax upon cider. Now that he himself had succeeded to that

office, he cast his eyes across the Atlantic, and, on the plea that the

late war had to a certain extent been undertaken for the defence of the

Colonies in North America, he proposed to make them bear a share in the

burden caused by enterprises from which they had profited. Accordingly,

in March, 1764, he proposed a series of resolutions imposing a variety

of import duties on different articles of foreign produce imported into

"the British Colonies and plantations in America," and also export

duties on a few articles of American growth when "exported or conveyed

to any other place except to Great Britain." Another resolution affirmed

"that, toward defraying the said expense, it might be proper to charge

certain stamp-duties in the said Colonies and plantations."

The resolutions imposing import and export duties were passed by both

Houses almost without comment. That relating to a stamp-duty he did not

press at the moment, announcing that he postponed it for a year, in

order to ascertain in what light it would be regarded by the Colonists

themselves; and as most, if not all, of the Colonies had a resident

agent in London, he called them together, explained to them the object

and anticipated result of the new imposition (for such he admitted it to

be), and requested them to communicate his views to their constituents,

adding an offer that, if they should prefer any other tax likely to be

equally productive, he should be desirous to consult their wishes in the

matter.

He probably regarded such language on his part as a somewhat superfluous

exercise of courtesy or conciliation, so entire was his conviction of

the omnipotence of Parliament, and of the impossibility of any loyal man

or body of men calling its power in question. But he was greatly

deceived. His message was received in America with universal

dissatisfaction. Of the thirteen States which made up the body of

Colonies, there was scarcely one whose Assembly did not present a

petition against the proposed measure, and against any other which might

be considered as an alternative. Grenville, however, was not a man to be

moved by petitions or remonstrances. He was rather one whom opposition

of any kind hardened in his purpose; and, as no substitute had been

suggested, at the opening of the session of 1765 he proposed a series of

resolutions requisite to give effect to the vote of the previous year,

and imposing "certain stamp-duties and other duties" on the settlements

in America, perhaps thinking to render his disregard of the objections

which had been made less unpalatable by the insertion of words binding

the government to apply the sums to be thus raised to "the expenses of

defending, protecting, and securing" the Colonies themselves. The

resolutions were passed, as the "Parliamentary History" records, "almost

without debate," on the 6th of March.[34] But the intelligence was

received in every part of the Colonies with an indignant

dissatisfaction, which astonished even their own agents in England.[35]

Formidable riots broke out in several provinces. In Massachusetts the

man who had been appointed Distributor of Stamps was burnt in effigy;

the house of the Lieutenant-governor was attacked by a furious mob, who

avowed their determination to murder him if he fell into their hands;

and resolutions were passed by the Assemblies of the different States to

convene a General Congress at New York in the autumn, to organize a

resistance to the tax, and to take the general state of affairs into

consideration.

Before, however, that time came, a series of events having no connection

with these transactions had led to a change of ministry in England, and

the new cabinet was less inclined to carry matters with a high hand.

Indeed, even the boldest statesman could hardly have learned the state

of feeling which had been excited in America without apprehension, and

those who had the chief weight in the new administration were not men to

imperil the state by an insistance on abstract theories of right and

prerogative. Accordingly, when, after Lord Rockingham had become

Prime-minister, Parliament met in December, 1765, the royal speech

recommended the state of affairs in America to the consideration of

Parliament (a recommendation which manifestly implied a disposition on

the part of the King's advisers to induce the House of Commons to

retrace its steps), papers were laid before Parliament, and witnesses

from America were examined, and among them a man who had already won a

high reputation by his scientific acquirements, but who had not been

previously prominent as a politician, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. He had come

over to England as agent for Pennsylvania, and his examination, as

preserved in the "Parliamentary History," may be taken as a complete

statement of the matter in dispute from the American point of view, and

of the justification which the Colonists conceived themselves to have

for refusing to submit to pay such a tax as had now been imposed upon

them. At a later day he was one of the most zealous, as he was probably

one of the earliest, advocates of separation from England; but as yet

neither his language nor his actions afforded any trace of such a

feeling.

He affirmed[36] the general temper of the Colonists toward Great Britain

to have been, till this act was passed, the best in the world. They

considered themselves as a part of the British empire, and as having one

common interest with it. They did not consider themselves as foreigners.

They were jealous for the honor and prosperity of this nation, and

always were, and always would be, ready to support it as far as their

little power went. They considered the Parliament of Great Britain as

the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges, and

always spoke of it with the utmost respect and veneration. They had

given a practical proof of their goodwill by having raised, clothed, and

paid during the last war nearly 25,000 men, and spent many millions; nor

had any Assembly of any Colony ever refused duly to support the

government by proper allowances from time to time to public officers.

They had always been ready, and were ready now, to tax themselves. The

Colonies had Assemblies of their own, which were their Parliaments. They

were, in that respect, in the same situation as Ireland. Their

Assemblies had a right to levy money on the subject, then to grant to

the crown, and, indeed, had constantly done so; and he himself was

specially instructed by the Assembly of his own State to assure the

ministry that, as they always had done, so they should always think it

their duty to grant such aids to the crown as were suitable to their

circumstances and abilities, whenever called upon for the purpose in a

constitutional manner; and that instruction he had communicated to the

ministry. But the Colonies objected to Parliament laying on them such a

tax as that imposed by the Stamp Act. Some duties, they admitted, the

Parliament had a right to impose, but he drew a distinction between

"those duties which were meant to regulate commerce and internal taxes."

The authority of Parliament to regulate commerce had never been disputed

by the Colonists. The sea belonged to Britain. She maintained by her

fleets the safety of navigation on it; she kept it clear of pirates; she

might, therefore, have a natural and equitable right to some toll or

duty, on merchandise carried through that part of her dominions, toward

defraying the expenses she was at in ships to maintain the safety of

that carriage. But the case of imposition of internal taxes was wholly

different from this. The Colonists held that, by the charters which at

different times had been granted to the different States, they were

entitled to all the privileges and liberties of Englishmen. They found

in the Great Charters, and the Petition and Declarations of Right, that

one of the privileges of English subjects is that they are not to be

taxed but by their common consent; and these rights and privileges had

been confirmed by the charters which at different times had been granted

to the different States. In reply to a question put to him, he allowed

that in the Pennsylvania charter there was a clause by which the King

granted that he would levy no taxes on the inhabitants unless it were

with the consent of the Colonial Assembly, or by an act of Parliament;

words which certainly seemed to reserve a right of taxation to the

British Parliament; but he also demonstrated that, in point of fact, the

latter part of the clause had never been acted on, and the Colonists

had, therefore, relied on it, from the first settlement of the province,

that the Parliament never would nor could, by the color of that clause

in the charter, assume a right of taxing them till it had qualified

itself to exercise such right by admitting representatives from the

people to be taxed. And, in addition to objections on principle, he

urged some that he regarded as of great force as to the working of this

particular tax imposed by the Stamp Act. It was not an equal tax, as the

greater part of the revenue derived from it must arise from lawsuits for

the recovery of debts, and be paid by the lower sort of people; it was a

heavy tax on the poor, and a tax on them for being poor. In the back

settlements, where the population was very thin, the inhabitants would

often be unable to get stamps without taking a long journey for the

purpose. The scarcity of specie, too, in the country would cause the

pressure to be felt with great severity, as, in his opinion, there was

not gold and silver enough in the Colonies to pay the stamp-duty for a

single year. In reply to another question, whether the Colonists would

be satisfied with a repeal of the Stamp Act without a formal

renunciation of the abstract right of Parliament to impose it, he

replied that he believed they would be satisfied. He thought the

resolutions of right would give them very little concern, if they were

never attempted to be carried into practice. The Colonies would probably

consider themselves in the same situation in that respect as Ireland.

They knew that the English Parliament claimed the same right with regard

to Ireland, but that it never exercised it; and they might believe that

they would never exercise it in the Colonies any more than in Ireland.

Indeed, they would think that it never could exercise such a right till

representatives from the Colonies should be admitted into Parliament,

and that whenever an occasion arose to make Parliament regard the

taxation of the Colonies as indispensable, representatives would be

ordered.

This last question put to the witness, like several others in the course

of his examination, had been framed with the express purpose of

eliciting an answer to justify the determination on the subject to which

Lord Rockingham and his colleagues had come. It could not be denied that

the government was placed in a situation of extreme difficulty--

difficulty created, in part, by the conduct of the Colonists themselves.

That, as even their most uncompromising advocate, Mr. Pitt, admitted,

had been imprudent and intemperate, though it was the imprudence of men

who "had been driven to madness by injustice." On the one hand, to

repeal an act the opposition to which had been marked by fierce riots,

such as those of Boston, and even in the Assemblies of some of the

States by language scarcely short of treason,[37] seemed a concession to

intimidation scarcely compatible with the maintenance of the dignity of

the crown or the legitimate authority of Parliament. On the other hand,

to persist in the retention of a tax which the whole population affected

by it was evidently determined to resist to the uttermost, was to incur

the still greater danger of rebellion and civil war. In this dilemma,

the ministers resolved on a course calculated, as they conceived, to

avoid both evils, by combining a satisfaction of the complaints of the

Colonists with an assertion of the absolute supremacy of the British

crown and Parliament for every purpose. And on February 24, 1766, the

Secretary of State brought in a bill which, after declaring, in its

first clause, "that the King's Majesty, by and with the consent of the

Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons of Great Britain, in

Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power

and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity

to bind the Colonists and people of America, subjects of the crown of

Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever," proceeded to repeal the Stamp

Act, giving a strong proof of the sincerity of the desire to conciliate

the Colonists by the unusual step of fixing the second reading of the

bill for the next day.

But in its different clauses it encountered a twofold opposition, which

he had, probably, not anticipated. It is unnecessary to notice that

which rested solely on the inexpediency of repealing the Stamp Act, "the

compulsory enforcement of which was required by the honor and dignity of

the kingdom." But the first clause was even more strenuously resisted,

on grounds which its opponents affirmed to rest on the fundamental

principles of the constitution. It was urged in the House of Commons by

Mr. Pitt that, "as the Colonies were not represented in Parliament,

Great Britain had no legal right nor power to lay a tax upon them--that

taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. Taxes," said

the great orator, "are the voluntary gift and grant of the Commons

alone. In legislation the three estates of the realm are alike

concerned; but the concurrence of the peers and the crown to a tax is

only necessary to clothe it with the form of a law; the gift and grant

is in the Commons alone.... The distinction between legislation and

taxation is essentially necessary to liberty."

Mr. Pitt had no claim to be considered as a great authority in the

principles of constitutional law. George II., slight as was his

political knowledge or wisdom, complained on one occasion of the

ignorance of a Secretary of State who had never read Vattel; and in this

very debate he even boasted of his ignorance of "law-cases and acts of

Parliament." But his coadjutor in the House of Lords (Lord Camden, at

this time Chief-justice of the Common Pleas) owed the chief part of the

respect in which he was held to his supposed excellence as a

constitutional lawyer, and he fully endorsed and expanded Pitt's

arguments when the bill came up to the House of Lords. He affirmed that

he spoke as "the defender of the law and the constitution; that, as the

affair was of the greatest consequence, and in its consequences might

involve the fate of kingdoms, he had taken the strictest review of his

arguments, he had examined and re-examined all his authorities; and that

his searches had more and more convinced him that the British Parliament

had no right to tax the Americans. The Stamp Act was absolutely illegal,

contrary to the fundamental laws of nature, contrary to the fundamental

laws of this constitution--a constitution governed on the eternal and

immutable laws of nature. The doctrine which he was asserting was not

new; it was as old as the constitution; it grew up with it; indeed, it

was its support. Taxation and representation are inseparably united. God

hath joined them; no British government can put them asunder. To

endeavor to do so is to stab our very vitals." And he objected to the

first clause (that which declared the power and right to tax), on the

ground that if the ministers "wantonly pressed this declaration,

although they were now repealing the Stamp Act, they might pass it again

in a month." He even argued that "they must have future taxation in

view, or they would hardly assert their right to enjoy the pleasure of

offering an insult." He was answered by Lord Northington (the

Chancellor) and by Lord Mansfield (the Chief-justice), both of whom

supported the motion to repeal the tax, but who also agreed in denying

the soundness of his doctrine that, as far as the power was concerned,

there was any distinction between a law to tax and a law for any other

purpose; and Lord Mansfield farther denied the validity of the argument

which it had been attempted to found on the circumstance that the

Colonies were not represented in Parliament, propounding, on the

contrary, what Lord Campbell calls "his doctrine of virtual

representation." "There can," said he, "be no doubt but that the

inhabitants of the Colonies are represented in Parliament, as the

greatest part of the people of England are represented, among nine

millions of whom there are eight who have no votes in electing members

of Parliament. Every objection, therefore, to the dependency of the

Colonies upon Parliament which arises upon the ground of representation

goes to the whole present constitution of Great Britain.... For what

purpose, then, are arguments drawn from a distinction in which there is

no real difference of a virtual and an actual representation? A member

of Parliament chosen for any borough represents not only the

constituents and inhabitants of that particular place, but he represents

the inhabitants of every other borough in Great Britain. He represents

the City of London and all the other Commons of the land, and the

inhabitants of all the colonies and dominions of Great Britain, and is

in duty and conscience bound to take care of their interests."

Lord Mansfield's doctrine of a virtual representation of the Colonies

must be admitted to be overstrained. The analogy between the case of

colonists in a country from no part of which representatives are sent to

Parliament, and that of a borough or county where some classes of the

population which may, in a sense, be regarded as spokesmen or agents of

the rest form a constituency and return members, must be allowed to

fail; yet the last sentences of this extract are worth preserving, as

laying down the important constitutional principle, subsequently

expanded and enforced with irresistible learning and power of argument

by Burke, that a member of the House of Commons is not a delegate,

bound, under all circumstances, to follow the opinions or submit to the

dictation of his constituents, but that from the moment of his election

he is a councillor of the whole kingdom, bound to exercise an

independent judgment for the interests of the whole people, rather than

to guide himself by the capricious or partial judgments of a small

section of it. But in its more immediate objects--that of establishing

the two principles, that the constitution knows of no limitation to the

authority of Parliament, and of no distinction between the power of

taxation and that of any other kind of legislation--Lord Mansfield's

speech is now universally admitted to have been unanswerable.[38]

The abstract right was unquestionably on the side of the minister and

the Parliament who had imposed the tax. But he is not worthy of the name

of statesman who conceives absolute rights and metaphysical distinctions

to be the proper foundation for measures of government, and pays no

regard to custom, to precedent, to the habits and feelings of the people

to be governed; who, disregarding the old and most true adage, _summum

jus summa injuria_, omits to take into his calculations the expediency

of his actions when legislating for a nation which he is in the daily

habit of weighing in his private affairs. The art or science of

government are phrases in common use; but they would be void of meaning

if all that is requisite be to ascertain the strict right or power, and

then unswervingly to act upon it in all its rigor. And, therefore, while

it must be admitted that the character of the power vested in King,

Lords, and Commons assembled in Parliament is unlimited and illimitable,

and that the legal competency to enact a statute depends in no degree

whatever on the wisdom or folly, the justice or wickedness, of the

statute, the advice given to a constitutional sovereign by his advisers

must be guided by other considerations. To quote by anticipation the

language addressed to the Commons on this subject by Burke eight years

afterward, the proper policy was "to leave the Americans as they

anciently stood ... To be content to bind America by laws of trade.

Parliament had always done it. And this should be the reason for binding

their trade. Not to burden them by taxes; Parliament was not used to do

so from the beginning; and this should be the reason for not taxing.

These are the arguments of states and kingdoms."[39]

The ministry were strong enough to carry their resolutions through both

Houses. Their measure was divided into two acts, one known as the

Declaratory Act, asserting the absolute and universal authority of

Parliament; the other repealing the Stamp Act of the preceding year. And

both were passed without alteration, though the Lords divided against

them on both the second and third readings of the bill for repeal

founded on them,[40] some of them entering long protests in the journals

of the House. The right to tax was asserted, but the tax itself was

repealed. And Franklin's estimate of the feelings on the subject

entertained by his countrymen was fully verified by the reception which

the intelligence met with in the Colonies. To quote the description of

Lord Stanhope: "In America the repeal of the Stamp Act was received with

universal joy and acclamation. Fireworks and festivals celebrated the

good news, while addresses and thanks to the King were voted by all the

Assemblies.... The words of the Declaratory Act, indeed, gave the

Americans slight concern. They fully believed that no practical

grievance could arise from it. They looked upon it merely as a salve to

the wounded pride of England; as only that 'bridge of gold' which,

according to the old French saying, should always be allowed to a

retreating assailant."[41]

A recent writer, however, has condemned the addition of the declaration

of the abstract right to tax with great vehemence. "Nothing," says Lord

Campbell,[42] "could exceed the folly of accompanying the repeal of the

Stamp Act with the statutable declaration of the abstract right to tax."

But it does not seem difficult to justify the conduct of the ministry in

this particular. For, besides the great weight deservedly attached to

Franklin's assurance that the declaration would not be objected to by

the Colonists, and besides the consideration that, on a general view, it

was desirable, if not indispensable, to impress on all classes of

subjects, whether at home or abroad, the constitutional doctrine of the

omnipotence of Parliament, the line of argument adopted by Mr. Pitt and

Lord Camden, in denying that omnipotence, left the ministers no

alternative but that of asserting it, unless they were prepared to

betray their trust as guardians of the constitution. Forbearance to

insist on the Declaratory Act could not fail to have been regarded as an

acquiescence on their part in a doctrine which Lord Campbell in the same

breath admits to be false. It may be added, as a consideration of no

small practical weight, that, without such a Declaratory Act, the King

would have been very reluctant to consent to the other and more

important Repealing Act. And, on the whole, the conduct of the ministry

may, we think, be regarded as the wisest settlement both of the law and

of the practice. It asserted the law in a manner which offended no one;

and it made a precedent for placing the spirit of statesmanship above

the letter of the law, and for forbearing to put forth in its full

strength the prerogatives whose character was not fully understood by

those who might be affected by them, and also could plead that

Parliament itself had contributed to lead them to misunderstand it by

its own conduct in never before exerting it.

For the moment, then, contentment and tranquillity were restored in the

Colonies. Unhappily, they were not lasting. The same year which saw the

triumph of the Rockingham administration in the repeal of the Stamp Act,

witnessed also its fall before a discreditable intrigue. And the

ministry which succeeded it had not been a year in office before the new

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townsend, revived the discontents

in America which Lord Rockingham had appeased. It cannot be said,

however, that the blame should all belong to him; or that the Rockingham

party in the House of Commons were entirely free from a share in it.

They were--not unnaturally, perhaps--greatly irritated at the intrigue

by which Lord Chatham had superseded them, and were not disinclined to

throw difficulties in the way of their successors, for which the events

of the next year afforded more than one opportunity. Lord Chatham, as

has been mentioned, was universally recognized as the chief of the new

ministry, though he abstained from taking the usual office of First Lord

of the Treasury, and contented himself with the Privy Seal; but he had

constructed it of such discordant elements[43] that no influence but his

own could preserve consistency in its acts or harmony among its members,

as nothing but his name could give it consideration either in Parliament

or in the country. In the first months of the next year, 1767, he was

attacked with an illness which for a time disabled him from attending

the cabinet, being, apparently, the forerunner of that more serious

malady which, before the end of the summer, compelled his long

retirement from public life; and the Opposition took advantage of the

state of disorganization and weakness which his illness caused among his

colleagues, to defeat them on the Budget in the House of Commons, by an

amendment to reduce the land-tax, which caused a deficiency in the

supplies of half a million. This deficiency it, of course, became

necessary to meet by some fresh tax; and Townsend--who, though endowed

with great richness of eloquence, was of an imprudent, not to say rash,

temper, and was possessed of too thorough a confidence in his own

ingenuity and fertility of resource ever to be inclined to take into

consideration any objections to which his schemes might be

liable--proposed to raise a portion of the money which was needed by

taxes on glass, paper, tea, and one or two other articles, to be paid as

import duties in the American Colonies. His colleagues, and especially

the Duke of Grafton himself, the First Lord of the Treasury, and as such

the nominal Prime-minister, having been also, as Secretary of State, a

member of Lord Rockingham's ministry, which had repealed the former

taxes, did not consent to the measure without great and avowed

reluctance; but yielded their own judgment to the strong feeling in its

favor which notoriously existed in the House of Commons.[44] Indeed,

that House passed the clauses imposing these import duties without

hesitation, being, probably, influenced in no small degree by the

evidence given in the preceding year by Dr. Franklin, who, as has been

already seen, had explained that the Colonists drew a distinction

between what he called "internal taxes" and import duties "intended to

regulate commerce," and that to the latter class they were not inclined

to object. And a second consideration was, that these new duties were

accompanied and counterbalanced by a reduction of some other taxes; so

that the ministry contended that the effect of these financial measures,

taken altogether, would be to lower to the Colonists the price of the

articles affected by them rather than to raise it. But one of the

resolutions adopted provided that the whole of the money to be raised

from these taxes should not be spent in America, but that, after making

provision for certain Colonial objects specified, "the residue of such

duties should be paid into the receipt of his Majesty's Exchequer, and

there reserved, to be from time to time disposed of by Parliament toward

defraying the necessary expenses of defending, protecting, and securing

the said Colonies and plantations." And this clause seems to have been

understood as designed to provide means for augmenting the number of

regular troops to be maintained in the Colonies, whose employment in the

recent disturbances had made them more unpopular than formerly.[45]

At all events, the intelligence of these new taxes, though only import

duties, found the Colonists in a humor to resist any addition of any

kind to their financial burdens. The events of the last two years had

taught them their strength. It was undeniable that the repeal of the

Stamp Act had been extorted by the riots in Boston and other places, and

the success of this system of intimidation could not fail to encourage

its repetition. Accordingly, the news of this fresh attempt at taxation

was met by a unanimous determination to resist it. Newspaper writers and

pamphleteers denounced not only the duties but the ministry which

imposed them. Petitions from almost every State were sent over to

England, addressed to the King and to the Parliament; but the violent

temper of the leaders of the populace was not content to wait for

answers to them. Associations were at once formed in Boston and one or

two other cities, where resolutions were adopted in the spirit of

retaliation (as their framers avowed), to desist from the importation of

any articles of British commerce, and to rely for the future on American

manufactures. The principal Custom-house officers at Boston were badly

beaten, and others were compelled to seek refuge in a man-of-war which

happened to be in the harbor.

It would be painful, and at the present day useless, to trace the steps

by which these local disturbances gradually grew into one general

insurrection. The spirit of resistance was undoubtedly fanned by a party

which from the first contemplated a total separation from England as its

ultimate result,[46] if, indeed, they had not conceived the design even

before Grenville had given the first provocation to discontent. But the

Colonists were not without advocates in England, even among the members

of the government. The Duke of Grafton, while he remained

Prime-minister, was eager to withdraw all the duties of which they

complained; but he was overruled by the majority of his colleagues. He

prevailed, however, so far that Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of

State, was authorized to write a circular-letter to the governors of the

different provinces, in which he disowned, in the most distinct language

possible, "a design to propose to Parliament to lay any farther taxes

upon America for the purpose of raising a revenue," and promised for the

next session a repeal of all the taxes except that on tea; and when the

Duke retired from the Treasury, and was succeeded by Lord North, that

statesman himself brought forward the promised repeal in an elaborate

speech,[47] in which he explained that the duty on tea, which he alone

proposed to retain, had been originally a boon to the Americans rather

than an injury, as being accompanied by the removal of a far heavier

tax. But he admitted that even that consideration was not the one which

influenced him in his opinion that that duty should be maintained, so

greatly was the perception that the real object of those who complained

of it was, not the redress of a grievance, but the extinction of a right

which was an essential part of "the controlling supremacy of England."

The fact that the right to tax had been denied made it a positive duty

on the part of the English minister to exert that right. "To temporize

would be to yield, and the authority of the mother country, if now

unsupported, would be relinquished forever." And he avowed his idea of

the policy proper to be pursued to be "to retain the right of taxing

America, but to give it every relief that might be consistent with the

welfare of the mother country." He carried his resolution, though the

minority--which on this occasion was led by Mr. Pownall, who had himself

been Governor of Massachusetts, and who moved an amendment to include

tea in the list of taxes proposed to be repealed--was stronger than

usual.[48] But the concession failed to conciliate a single Colonist; it

had become, as Burke said four years afterward, a matter of feeling,[49]

and the irritation fed on itself, till, in 1773, a fresh act, empowering

the East India Company to export tea to the Colonies direct from their

own warehouses without its being subject to any duty in England--which

Lord North undoubtedly intended as a boon to the Colonists--only

increased the exasperation. The ships which brought the tea to Boston

were boarded and seized by a formidable body of rioters disguised as

native savages, and the tea was thrown into the sea. The intelligence

was received in England with very different feelings by the different

parties in the state. The ministers conceived themselves forced to

assert the dignity of the crown, and proposed bills to inflict severe

punishment on both the City of Boston and the whole Province of

Massachusetts. The Opposition insisted on removing the cause of these

disturbances by a total repeal of the tea-duty. The minister prevailed

by a far larger majority than before, but his success only increased the

exasperation in the Colonies; and it was an evil omen for peace that the

leaders of the resistance began to search the records of the English

Long Parliament "for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the

Puritans of that day."[50] The next year saw fresh attempts to procure

the repeal of the obnoxious tax rejected by the House of Commons; but,

before the news of this division reached America, blood had already been

shed.[51] Civil war began. The next year the Colonies, now united in one

solid body, asserted their Independence, taking the title of the United

States; and, though the government at home made more than one effort to

recall the Colonists to their allegiance, and sent out commissioners of

high rank, with large powers of concession; and though in one remarkable

instance the mission of Mr. Penn, in the summer of 1775, with the

petition to the King known as "the Olive Branch," seemed to show a

desire for a maintenance of the union on the part of the Colonial

Congress,[52] from the moment that the sword was drawn all hope of

preserving the connection of the Colonies must have been seen by all

reasonable men to be at an end.

It is beside our present purpose to recapitulate the military operations

of the war, though they verified another of Burke's warnings, that,

supposing all moral difficulties to be got over, the ocean

remained--that could not be dried up; and, as long as it continued in

its present bed, so long all the causes which weakened authority by

distance must continue. In fact, distance from England was one of the

main circumstances which decided the contest. The slowness of

communication--almost inconceivable to the present generation--rendered

impossible that regularity in the transport of re-enforcements and

supplies which was indispensable to success; and, added to the strange

absence of military skill shown by every one of the British generals,

soon placed the eventual issue of the war beyond a doubt. But one

measure by which Lord North's government endeavored to provide for the

strengthening of the army employed in America was so warmly challenged

on constitutional grounds, that, though the fortunate separation of

Hanover from Great Britain has prevented the possibility of any

recurrence of such a proceeding, it would be improper to pass it over.

In his speech at the opening of the autumnal session of 1775, the King

announced to the Houses that, in order to leave a larger portion of the

established forces of the kingdom available for service in North

America, he "had sent a part of his Electoral troops to the garrisons of

Gibraltar and Port Mahon." And the announcement aroused a vehement

spirit of opposition, which found vent in the debates of both Houses on

the address, and in two substantive motions condemning the measure as a

violation of the constitution as established by the Bill of Rights and

the Act of Settlement. It was strenuously maintained that both these

statutes forbade the raising or keeping on foot a standing army in the

kingdom in time of peace, and also the introduction of foreign troops

into this kingdom, without the previous consent of Parliament, on any

pretence whatever; and that "the fact that Gibraltar and Minorca were

detached from these islands did not exclude them from the character of

forming a part of the British dominion." And on these grounds Lord

Shelburne, who supported Lord Rockingham on an amendment to the address,

did not hesitate to denounce this employment of the Hanoverian

regiments, as "fundamentally infringing the first principles of our

government," and to declare it "high-treason against the constitution."

He asked, "if there were a settled plan to subdue the liberties of this

country, what surer means could be adopted than those of arming Roman

Catholics and introducing foreign troops?"[53] and compared the measure

under discussion to the case of the Dutch regiments of William III.,

"which the Parliament wisely refused to allow him to retain." In the

House of Commons, the Opposition was led by Sir James Lowther and

Governor Johnstone, the latter of whom "appealed to the clause in the

Act of Settlement which enacted that no person born of other than

English parents should enjoy any office or place of trust, civil or

military, within the kingdom;" and argued that to employ foreign

officers in the protection of a British fortress was to place them in an

"office of great military trust."

The discussion brought to light strange divisions and weakness in the

ministry. The ministerial lawyers differed on the grounds on which they

relied, the Attorney-general, Thurlow, denying that the expression "this

kingdom" in the Bill of Rights included the foreign dependencies of the

crown[54] (a narrowing of its force which the Chancellor, Lord Bathurst,

wholly repudiated), while the argument on which he himself insisted most

strongly, that the existence of rebellion in America put end to all

conditions which supposed the kingdom to be at peace, could not obtain

the support of any one of his colleagues. But a plea urged by an

independent member, Lord Denbigh, was regarded by some of the speakers

with greater favor; his contention being that neither the Bill of Rights

nor the Act of Settlement had been violated, since both those great

statutes must be interpreted with reference to the time at which they

were framed, and to the recent acts of James II. and William III., the

recurrence of which they had been designed to prevent, acts to which the

present proceeding bore no resemblance.

A stronger justification, however, might have been found in very recent

precedents. In 1745 the ministers had brought over six thousand Dutch

troops to re-enforce the army of the Duke of Cumberland, and their act

had been subsequently approved by Parliament. And in 1756, at the

commencement of the seven years' war, when the loss of Minorca had led

to such a distrust of our fleets that a French invasion was very

generally apprehended, both Houses presented addresses to George II.,

begging him to bring over some Hanoverian regiments; and, in the course

of the next year, other addresses to thank him for compliance with their

entreaty.

Looking at the strict law of the question, few lawyers doubt that the

expression "this kingdom" in the Bill of Rights includes the entire

dominions of the crown, or that that great statute was undoubtedly

intended to protect the privileges of all their inhabitants, whether

within the four seas or in foreign settlements. But it also seems that

the clause against raising and keeping on foot a standing army without

the consent of Parliament was not more violated by keeping a mixed

garrison in Gibraltar and Port Mahon than garrisons consisting of native

soldiers only; and undoubtedly the keeping of an armed force in both

these fortresses had been sanctioned by Parliament. Nor could the

colonel of a foreign regiment in garrison under the command of a British

governor be fairly said to be in an office of great military trust. So

far, therefore, the charge against the ministry may be thought to have

failed. But the accusation of having transgressed the clause which

prohibits "the introduction of foreign troops into this kingdom without

the previous consent of Parliament on any pretence whatever," must, on

the other hand, be regarded as proved. And, indeed, Lord North himself

may be taken to have shown some consciousness that it was so, since he

justified his conduct in omitting to procure that previous consent by

the necessity of the case, by the plea that, as Parliament was in

vacation, the time which would have been consumed in waiting for its

sanction would have neutralized the advantage desired from the

employment of the Hanoverians, since the regiments which they were to

replace at Gibraltar and Port Mahon could not, after such delay, have

reached America in time to be of service; and since he also consented

eventually to ask Parliament for an Act of Indemnity, the preamble of

which affirmed the existence of doubts as to the legality of the step

which had been taken. And the fate of this act afforded a still more

striking proof of the divisions in the ministry, since, after Lord North

himself had proposed it in the House of Commons, and it had been passed

there by a large majority, it was rejected in the House of Lords, where

his own colleagues, Lord Gower, Lord Suffolk, and Lord Weymouth, spoke

and voted against it as needless, because, in their judgment, no doubt

of the state of the law on the subject could exist.

From a statesman-like point of view, the employment of the Hanoverians

seems abundantly defensible, if force were still to be employed to bring

back the Colonists to their obedience. The circumstance of their being

subjects of our sovereign in his other character of Elector of Hanover,

clearly distinguished it from the hiring of the Hessian and Brunswick

mercenaries, which has been deservedly condemned. And, as the entire

number fell short of two thousand,[55] Lord Shelburne's expression of

fear for the liberties and religion of Englishmen was an absurd

exaggeration. Moreover, the warm approval which, less than twenty years

before, Parliament had given to the introduction of a far larger body of

the same troops into England itself, justified the anticipation that a

similar sanction would now be cheerfully given. That sanction--which,

indeed, might have been thought to be invited by the announcement of the

measure in the King's speech--was undoubtedly requisite. And, if it was,

a Bill of Indemnity for having acted without it was equally necessary.

But, as has been seen in the last chapter, for an administration, on

urgent occasions, to take action on its own responsibility, and then to

apply for indemnity, is a course in strict harmony with the practice of

the constitution; and if in this instance the ministers are in any

respect blamable, their error would seem to have been limited to their

abstaining from instantly calling Parliament together to sanction their

act, and being contented to wait for the ordinary time of the Houses

meeting.

The war, therefore, went on. The assertion of their independence by the

Colonies divided, and, so far, weakened, the advocates of their cause in

Parliament, one section of whom, led by Lord Chatham, regarded any

diminution of our dominion as not only treasonable, but ruinous; on the

other hand, it procured them the alliance of France and Spain. But it

cannot be said that either of these incidents produced any practical

effect on the result of the war. Lord Chatham's refusal to contemplate

their independence could not retard its establishment; and the alliance

of France and Spain, which brought nothing but disaster to those

countries, could not accelerate it by a single moment. For nearly six

years the war continued with alternations of success, the victories

gained by the British arms being the more numerous, the triumphs of the

Americans being incomparably the more important, involving as they did

the surrender of two entire armies, the latter of which, that of Lord

Cornwallis, in 1781, did, in fact, terminate the war, and with the war

the existence of the ministry which had conducted it. A singularly rapid

succession of new administrations ensued--so rapid that the negotiations

for peace which the first, that of Lord Rockingham, opened, were not

formally completed till the third,[56] known as the Coalition Ministry,

was on the point of dismissal. It would be beside our purpose to enter

into the details of the treaty which constituted the United States, as

they were now called, a nation by our formal recognition of their

independence. Even in that recognition, which was the most important

article of the treaty, no constitutional principle was involved, though

it affords the only instance in our history which can seem to throw a

doubt on our inheritance of that capacity for government which the Roman

poet claimed as, in ancient times, the peculiar attribute of his own

countrymen. It presents the only instance of a loss of territory peopled

by men who came of our blood, and who still spoke our language. It was a

stern and severe lesson; and yet, fraught with discredit and disaster as

it was, it nevertheless bore fruit in a later age which we may be

excused for regarding as an example of the generally predominating

influence of sober practical sense in our countrymen, when not led away

by the temporary excitement of passion, as shown in our capacity to take

home to ourselves and profit by the teachings of experience. The loss of

the American Colonies was caused by the submission of the Parliament and

nation to men of theory rather than of practice; ideologists, as

Napoleon called them; doctrinaires, to use the modern expression; men

who, because Parliament had an abstract right of universal legislation,

regarded it as a full justification for insisting on its exercise,

without giving a thought to the feelings, or prejudices, or habits of

those who might be affected by their measures. Abstractedly considered,

Lord Chatham and Lord Camden were undoubtedly wrong in denying the power

of Parliament to tax the Colonies; but there was better judgment in

their counsels, though founded on false premises, than in those of

Grenville and Townsend, though theirs was the more correct view of the

constitutional power of legislation. The two peers were wrong in their

principle; the two Chancellors of the Exchequer were unwise in their

application of their principle; and the practical error was the more

disastrous one.

It is now generally admitted that the true statesman-like course toward

the Colonies was that adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues in

1765--to avoid weakening the supreme power of Parliament by any

disavowal of the right to tax but to avoid imperilling the sovereign

authority of the King by a novel exertion of it. As much of our common

English law is made up of precedent, so, in a still greater degree, are

our feelings and ideas of our rights and privileges regulated by

precedent. And we lost America because in 1764 and 1767 neither minister

nor Parliament took men's feelings and prejudices into account. The loss

of the United States, therefore, was a lesson not undeserved; and by our

statesmen since that day it has been taken in the right spirit of

profiting by its teaching as a guide to their own conduct. Since that

day the enterprise of our people has planted our flag in regions far

more distant, and has extended the dominion of our sovereign over

provinces far more extensive than those which we then lost. And on some

of the administrations of the present reign the duty has fallen of

framing schemes of government for those new acquisitions, as also for

some of those previously possessed. In how different a spirit from that

which actuated the early ministers of George III.[57] those to whom the

task was committed by Queen Victoria applied themselves to their task

may be seen in a maxim laid down by the present Lord Grey, when he

presided at the Colonial Office (1846-1852), that "the success of free

institutions in any country depends far less upon the particular form of

those institutions than upon the character of the people on whom they

are conferred." But how he and others in the same office carried out

that principle must be reserved for a later chapter.

Besides the numerous motions which were brought forward by the

Opposition respecting the continuance and conduct of the war, there were

several also which were indirectly prompted by it. The Opposition

claimed to be on this subject not only the champions of the real

interests of the nation, but also its spokesmen, who expressed the

opinions and feelings of all the thinking and independent portion of the

people. That their efforts were overborne they attributed to the

subservience of the Parliament to the ministers, and of the ministers to

the crown.[58] And consequently several motions were made by members of

that party, the object of which was, in one way or another, to diminish

what they regarded as the undue influence of the crown. In one instance,

and that the most successful, a direct denunciation of that influence

was employed, but the earlier and more frequent proposals were directed

to the purification of the House of Commons, and to the strengthening of

its independence. It is remarkable that of these the two which related

to a subject of which the Commons are usually most especially and most

rightly jealous, the interference of peers in elections, had the worst

fortune. In 1780 complaints were made and substantiated that the Duke of

Bolton and the Duke of Chandos (who was also Lord-lieutenant of the

county) had exerted themselves actively in the last election for

Hampshire. And, in support of motions that these peers "had been guilty

of a breach of the privileges of the House, and an infringement of the

liberties and privileges of the Commons of Great Britain," a case was

adduced in which Queen Anne had dismissed the Bishop of Worcester from

the office of Almoner for similar interference. Nor did Lord Nugent, a

relative of the Duke of Chandos, deny the facts alleged; on the

contrary, he avowed them, and adopted a line of defence which many must

have thought an aggravation of the charge, since it asserted that to

prevent such interference was impossible, and therefore the House would

but waste its time in trying. However, on this occasion the House took

the view which he thus suggested to it, postponing all farther

consideration of the matter for four months; and the charge the Duke of

Bolton was shelved in a somewhat similar manner.

Even had these peers and such practices been censured with the very

greatest severity, the censures could have had but a very limited

effect. But it was on measures of a wider scope, embracing what began to

be called a Reform of Parliament, that the more zealous members of the

Opposition placed their chief reliance. As far as our records of the

debates can be trusted, Lord Chatham, ten years before, had given the

first hint of the desirableness of some alteration of the existing

system. On one occasion he denounced the small boroughs as "the rotten

part of the constitution," thus originating the epithet by which they in

time came to be generally described; but more usually he disavowed all

idea of disfranchising them, propounding rather a scheme for diminishing

their importance by a large addition to the county members. However, he

never took any steps to carry out his views, thinking, perhaps, that it

was not in the Upper House that such a subject should be first broached.

But he had not been long in the grave, when a formal motion for a reform

of a different kind was brought forward by one of the members for the

City of London, Alderman Sawbridge,[59] who, in May, 1780, applied for

leave to bring in "a bill for shortening the duration of Parliaments."

His own preference he avowed to be for annual Parliaments; but his

suspicion that the House would think such a measure too sweeping had

induced him to resolve to content himself with aiming at triennial

Parliaments. As leave was refused, the bill proposed to be introduced

may, perhaps, be thought disentitled to mention here, were it not that

the circumstance that proposals for shortening the duration of

Parliaments are still occasionally brought forward seems to warrant an

account of a few of the arguments by which those who took the leading

parts in the debate which ensued resisted it. The minister, Lord North,

declared that the Alderman had misunderstood the views of our ancestors

on the subject; as their desire had been, not that Parliament should be

elected annually, but that it should sit every year, an end which had

now been attained. Fox, on the other hand, while avowing that hitherto

he had always opposed similar motions, declared his wish now to see not

only triennial but annual Parliaments, as the sole means of lessening

the influence of the crown. "If any of his constituents were to ask him

to what our present misfortunes were ascribable, he should say the first

cause was the influence of the crown; the second, the influence of the

crown; and the third, the influence of the crown." But it was replied by

Burke, who usually exhausted every question he took in hand, that such a

bill would rather tend to augment that influence, since "the crown, by

its constant stated power, influence, and revenue, would be able to wear

out all opposition at elections; that it would not abate the interest or

inclination of ministers to apply that interest to the electors; on the

contrary, it would render it more necessary to them, if they desired to

have a majority in Parliament, to increase the means of that influence,

to redouble their diligence, and to sharpen dexterity in the

application. The whole effect of the bill would, therefore, be to remove

the application of some part of that influence from the elected to the

electors, and farther to strengthen and extend a court interest already

great and powerful in boroughs. It must greatly increase the cost of a

seat in Parliament; and, if contests were frequent, to many they would

become a matter of expense totally ruinous, which no fortunes could

bear. The expense of the last general election was estimated at

£1,500,000; and he remembered well that several agents for boroughs said

to candidates, 'Sir, your election will cost you £3000 if you are

independent; but, if the ministry supports you, it may be done for

£2000, and even less.'" And he adduced the case of Ireland, where

formerly, when "a Parliament sat for the King's life, the ordinary

charge for a seat was £1500; but now, when it sat for eight years, four

sessions, the charge was £2500 and upward." Such a change as was

proposed would cause "triennial corruption, triennial drunkenness,

triennial idleness, etc., and invigorate personal hatreds that would

never be allowed to soften. It would even make the member himself more

corrupt, by increasing his dependence on those who could best support

him at elections. It would wreck the fortunes of those who stood on

their own private means. It would make the electors more venal, and

injure the whole body of the people who, whether they have votes or not,

are concerned in elections." Finally, it would greatly impair the proper

authority of the House itself. "It would deprive it of all power and

dignity; and a House of Commons without power and without dignity,

either in itself or its members, is no House of Commons for this

constitution."

The applicability of some of his arguments--those founded on the

disorders at times of election--has been greatly diminished, if not

destroyed, at the present day, by the limitation of the polling to a

single day. The disfranchisement of the smaller boroughs has neutralized

others; but the expense of a general election is not believed to have

diminished, and that alone seems a strong objection to a system which

would render them more frequent than they are at present. Mr. Sawbridge

could not obtain the support of a third of his hearers.[60] But his

notions had partisans in the other House who were not discouraged by

such a division; and three weeks later the Duke of Richmond brought

forward a Reform Bill on so large a scale that, as the "Parliamentary

History" records, "it took him an hour and a half to read it," and which

contained provisions for annual Parliaments and universal suffrage. But

he met with even less favor than the Alderman, and his bill was rejected

without a division.

Still the subject was not allowed to rest. Even after Lord North had

been replaced by Lord Rockingham, the demand for Parliamentary Reform

was continued; the young Mr. Pitt making himself the mouth-piece of the

Reformers, and founding a motion which he made in May, 1782, on "the

corrupt influence of the crown; an influence which has been pointed at

in every period as the fertile source of all our miseries; an influence

which has been substituted in the room of wisdom, of activity, of

exertion, and of success; an influence which has grown up with our

growth and strengthened with our strength, but which, unhappily, has not

diminished with our diminution, nor decayed with our decay." He brought

forward no specific plan, but denounced the close boroughs, and asked

emphatically whether it were "representation" for "some decayed

villages, almost destitute of population, to send members to Parliament

under the control of the Treasury, or at the bidding of some great lord

or commoner." He, however, was defeated, though by the small majority of

twenty. And it is remarkable that when, the next year, he revived the

subject, developing a more precise scheme--akin to that which his father

had suggested, of increasing the number of county members, and including

provisions for the disfranchisement of boroughs which had been convicted

of systematic corruption--he was beaten by a far larger majority,[61]

the distinctness of his plan only serving to increase the numbers of his

adversaries. A kinsman of Pitt's, Lord Mahon, made an equally futile

attempt to diminish the expenses of elections, partly by inflicting very

heavy penalties on parties guilty of either giving or receiving

bribes,[62] and partly by prohibiting candidates from providing

conveyances for electors; and more than one bill for disfranchising

revenue-officers, as being specially liable to pressure from the

government, and to prevent contractors from sitting in Parliament, was

brought forward, but was lost, the smallness of the divisions in their

favor being not the least remarkable circumstance in the early history

of Reform. It was made still more evident that as yet the zeal for

Reform was confined to a few, when, two years afterward, Pitt, though

now invested with all the power of a Prime-minister, was as unable as

when in opposition to carry a Reform Bill, which in more than one point

foreshadowed the measure of 1832; proposing, as it did, the

disfranchisement of thirty-six small boroughs, which were to be

purchased of their proprietors nearly on the principle adopted in the

Irish Union Act, and on the other hand the enfranchisement of

copyholders; but it differed from Lord Grey's act in that it distributed

all the seats thus to be obtained among the counties, with the exception

of a small addition to the representatives of London and Westminster.

However, his supporters very little exceeded the number who had divided

with him in 1783, and Lord North, who led the Opposition in a speech

denouncing any change, had a majority of seventy-four. After this second

defeat, Pitt abandoned the question, at all events for the time; being

convinced, to quote Earl Stanhope's description of his opinion on the

subject, "that nothing but the pressure of the strongest popular

feeling, such as did not then exist, could induce many members to vote

against their own tenure of Parliament, or in fact against

themselves."[63] What, perhaps, weighed with him more, on deciding to

acquiesce in this vote as final, was the perception that as yet the

question excited no strong interest out-of-doors; and when, a few years

later, some who sought to become leaders of the people endeavored to

raise an agitation on the subject, their teachings were too deeply

infected with the contagion of the French Revolution to allow a wise

ruler to think it consistent with his duty to meet them with anything

but the most resolute discouragement.

But, concurrently with the first of these motions for Parliamentary

Reform, two more direct attacks on the royal influence, and on what was

alleged to be the undue exertion of it, were made in the session of

1780. The first was made by Burke, who brought forward a measure of

economical reform, demonstrating, in a speech of extraordinary power, a

vast mass of abuses, arising from corrupt waste in almost every

department of the state, and in every department of the royal household,

without exception, and proposing a most extensive plan of reform, which

dealt with royal dignities, such as the Duchy of Lancaster and the other

principalities annexed to the crown; with the crown-lands, a great

portion of which he proposed to sell; with the offices of the royal

household, a sufficient specimen of the abuses on which was furnished by

the statement, that the turnspit in the King's kitchen was a member of

Parliament; and with many departments of state, such as the Board of

Works and the Pay-office, etc. He was studiously cautious in his

language, urging, indeed, that his scheme of reform would "extinguish

secret corruption almost to the possibility of its existence, and would

destroy direct and visible influence equal to the offices of at least

fifty members of Parliament," but carefully guarding against any

expressions imputing this secret corruption, this influence which it was

so desirable to destroy, to the crown. But his supporters were less

moderate; and Mr. Thomas Townsend declared that facts which he mentioned

"contained the most unquestionable presumptive evidence of the influence

of the crown; he meant the diverting of its revenues to purposes which

dared not be avowed, in corrupting and influencing the members of both

Houses of Parliament;" and he asserted that "the principle and objects

of the bill were the reduction of the influence of the crown." The bill

was not opposed by the ministers on its principle; but Lord North, even

while consenting to its introduction, "did not pledge himself not to

oppose it in some or other of its subsequent stages;" and, in fact, his

supporters resisted it in almost every detail, some of them utterly

denying the right of the House to interfere at all with the expenditure

of the civil list; others contesting the propriety of alienating the

crown-lands; and a still greater number objecting to the abolition of

some of the offices which it was proposed to sweep away, such as that of

the "third Secretary of State, or Secretary for the Colonies," that of

"Treasurer of the Chamber," and others of a similar character. And, as

the minister succeeded in defeating him on several, though by no means

all, of these points, Burke at last gave up the bill, Fox warning the

House at the same time that it should be renewed session after session,

and boasting that even the scanty success which it had met with had been

worth the struggle.

The other direct attack was made by Mr. Dunning, who, perhaps, did not

then foresee that he himself was destined soon to fill one of the

offices which had come under the lash of Burke's sarcasm, and who a few

days afterward, in moving that it was necessary to declare "that the

influence of the crown had increased, was increasing, and ought to be

diminished" rested no small portion of his argument on the treatment

that Burke's bill had received. He affirmed that, though Lord North had

declared that "the influence of the crown was not too great," the

divisions on that bill, and on many other measures which had been under

discussion, were irrefragable proofs of the contrary. He quoted Hume and

Judge Blackstone as testifying to the existence and steady increase of

that influence, and "could affirm of his own knowledge, and pledge his

honor to the truth of the assertion, that he knew upward of fifty

members in that House who always voted in the train of the noble lord in

the blue ribbon,[64] but who reprobated and condemned, out of the House,

the measures they had supported and voted for in it." Mr. T. Pitt even

instanced "the present possession of office by Lord North as an

indubitable proof of the enormous influence of the crown."

It was not strange that Lord North opposed a resolution supported by

such arguments with all the power of the government, basing his own

opposition chiefly on the wisdom "of maintaining the rule long since

established by Parliament, never to vote abstract propositions." But he

presently saw that he was in a minority, and was forced to be content

with adopting and carrying an amendment of Mr. Dundas, one of the

members for Edinburgh, who flattered himself that by the insertion of

_now_ he converted a general assertion into a temporary declaration,

which might at a future time be disavowed as no longer applicable. A

majority of eighteen[65] affirmed the resolution; and when the mover

followed it up by a second, declaring that "it is competent to this

House to examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure of the

civil list revenues, as well as in every other branch of the public

revenue, whenever it shall seem expedient to the wisdom of this House to

do so," though the minister, with what was almost an appeal _ad

misericordiam_, "implored the House not to proceed," he did not venture

to take a division, and that resolution also, with one or two others

designed to give instant effect to them, were adopted and reported by

the committee to the House in a single evening.[66] The first resolution

did, in fact, embody a complaint, or at least an assertion, which the

Rockingham party had constantly made ever since the close of the

Marquis's first administration. In a speech which he had made only a few

weeks before,[67] Lord Rockingham himself had declared that "it was

early in the present reign promulgated as a court axiom that the power

and influence of the crown alone was sufficient to support any set of

men his Majesty might think proper to call to his councils." And Burke,

in his "short account" of his administration of 1765, had not only

imputed both its formation and its dismissal to the "express request"

and "express command of their royal master," but in the sentence, "they

discountenanced and, it is to be hoped, forever abolished, the dangerous

and unconstitutional practice of removing military officers for their

votes in Parliament," condemned with unmistakable plainness some acts of

the preceding ministry which were universally understood to have been

forced upon it by the King himself. General Conway had been deprived of

the colonelcy of his regiment; Lord Rockingham himself, with several

other peers, had been dismissed from Lord-lieutenancies, as a punishment

for voting against the ministry; such dismissals being a flagrant

attempt to put down all freedom of debate in Parliament, which of all

its privileges is the one most essential to its usefulness, if not to

its very existence. But, as Burke said, the practice had been abandoned,

and the first resolution, therefore, as Lord North said, involved no

practical result. It is the second resolution that confers a

constitutional character and importance on this debate. And it is not

too much to say that no vote of greater value had been come to for many

years. It might have been considered almost as the assertion of a truism

included in the power of granting supplies, to declare that the

Parliament has the right and authority to examine into and correct

abuses in the expenditure, if it had not been denied by more than one

speaker on the ministerial side, though not by the Prime-minister

himself. But that denial made the assertion of the right an imperative

duty; for certainly the exclusive right of authorizing a levy of money

would lose half its value, if unaccompanied by the other right of

preventing the waste of the revenue thus raised.

It may likewise be said that another principle of the parliamentary

constitution is, by implication, contained in Mr. Dunning's second

resolution, and that the words, "it is competent to this House to

examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure," were meant to

imply a denial of the competency of the other House to institute, or

even to share in, such an examination. Even if that were the object of

its framer, it only coincided with the view of the peers themselves, a

very considerable majority[68] of whom had, a few weeks before, rejected

a motion made by Lord Shelburne for the appointment of "a committee of

members of both Houses to examine without delay into the public

expenditure," principally on the ground urged by the Secretary of State,

Lord Stormont, and by several other peers, that "to inquire into,

reform, and control the public expenditure" would be an improper

interference with the privileges of the Commons; the Chief-justice, Lord

Mansfield, even going the length of warning his brother peers that such

interference might probably lead the Commons "to dispute in their turn

the power of judicature in the last resort exercised by the peers." Lord

Camden, on the contrary, affirmed, as a proposition which "no noble lord

present would deny, that that House had a right to inquire so far as the

disposal of public moneys came under their cognizance as a deliberative

body." And in the Lower House itself, Burke, in his speech in favor of

his Bill for Economical Reform, went even farther than Lord Camden, and

blamed the House of Lords for rejecting Lord Shelburne's motion on such

a ground. "They had gone," he said, "farther in self-denial than the

utmost jealousy of the Commons could have required. A power of examining

accounts, of censuring, correcting, and punishing the Commons had never,

that he knew of, thought of denying to the Lords. It was something more

than a century ago that the Commons had voted the Lords a useless body.

They had now voted themselves so." And it would seem that the Lords

themselves, to a certain extent, retracted this, their self-denying

vote, when, before the end of the same session, they discussed Burke's

Bill for Economical Reform, and passed it, though it was a money-bill,

"containing extraneous enactments," and as such contravened one of their

own standing orders which had been passed in the beginning of Queen

Anne's reign, when the system of "tacking," as it was called, had

excited great discontent, which was not confined to themselves. The

propriety of rejecting the bill on that ground was vigorously urged by

the only two lawyers who took part in the debate, the Chancellor, Lord

Thurlow, and Lord Loughborough, whose object was avowedly thus to give a

practical proof that the Lords "had not voted themselves useless." But

even those who disregarded their advice fully asserted the right of the

peers "to exercise their discretion as legislators." We have noticed

this matter on a previous occasion. The privilege claimed by the

Commons, both as to its origin and its principle, has been carefully

examined by Hallam, who has pointed out that in its full exclusiveness

it is not older than Charles II., since the Convention Parliament of

1660 "made several alterations in undoubted money-bills, to which the

Commons did not object."[69] And, though his attachment to Whig

principles might have inclined him to take their part in any dispute on

the subject, he nevertheless thinks that they have strained both

"precedent and constitutional analogy" in their assertion of this

privilege, which is "an anomaly that can hardly rest on any other ground

of defence than such a series of precedents as establish a

constitutional usage." The usage which for two centuries was established

in this case by the good-sense of both parties clearly was, that the

Lords could never originate a money-bill, nor insert any clause in one

increasing or even altering the burden laid by one on the people, but

that they were within their right in absolutely rejecting one. But such

a right has a tendency to lapse through defect of exercise; and we shall

hereafter see that "the disposition to make encroachments," which in

this matter Hallam imputes to the Commons, has led them in the present

reign to carry their pretensions to a height which at a former period

had been practically ignored by the one House, and formally disclaimed

by the other.

It may be remarked that Mr. Dunning's success in carrying his first

resolution did in itself, to a certain extent, disprove the truth of

that resolution, since, if the influence of the crown had been such as

he represented it, it must have been sufficient to insure its rejection.

But that resolution, and a new statute, of which in a previous session

he had been one of the principal promoters, are reckoned by Lord

Stanhope as among the chief causes of the disgraceful riots of 1780. In

the summer of 1778 he had seconded and supported with great eloquence

the repeal of some of the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics

which had been passed in the reign of William III. It was the first blow

at that system of religious intolerance which for nearly a century had

been one of the leading principles, as it had been also the chief

disgrace, of the constitution; and it was passed with scarcely any

opposition by both Houses. As, however, the statute which it repealed

had been enacted before the Scotch Union, the repeal did not extend to

Scotland, and it was necessary, therefore, to bring in a separate

measure for that kingdom. But the intelligence that such a proceeding

was in contemplation excited great wrath among the Scotch Presbyterians,

who, in the hope of defeating it, established a Protestant Association

for the defence of what they called the Protestant interest, and elected

as its president Lord George Gordon, a young nobleman whose acts on more

than one occasion gave reason to doubt the soundness of his intellect.

Against any relaxation whatever of the restrictions on the Roman

Catholics the Association sent up petitions to the House and to the

King, couched in language the wildness of which was hardly consistent

with the respect due to Parliament or to the sovereign. Apparently in

the hope of mitigating its opposition, the Houses the next year passed

an act, similar in principle, to relax some of the restrictions still

imposed on Protestant dissenting ministers by some of the subscriptions

which were required of them. But, as in the reign of Charles II., the

Presbyterian hatred of the Roman Catholics was too uncompromising to be

appeased in such a manner. And when Lord George found the House of

Commons itself acknowledging the danger with which the constitution was

threatened by the influence of the crown, he saw in their vote a

justification for all his alarms, since he had adopted as one of his

most settled opinions the belief that George III. was himself a Papist

at heart; and, under the influence of this strange idea, he drew up a

petition to Parliament which he invited all the members of the

Association to accompany him to present. His summons was received with

enthusiasm by his followers. The number who, in obedience to it,

mustered in St. George's Fields, which he had appointed as the place of

rendezvous, was not reckoned by any one at less than fifty thousand, and

some calculations even doubled that estimate. Whatever the number may

originally have been, it was speedily swelled by the junction of large

bands of the worst characters in the metropolis, who soon began to

display their strength by every kind of outrage. They commenced by

attacking some of the Roman Catholic chapels, which they burnt; and,

their audacity increasing at the sight of their exploits, they proceeded

to assault the houses of different members of Parliament who had voted

for the measures which had offended them. Because the Chief-justice,

Lord Mansfield, had lately presided at a trial where a Roman Catholic

had been acquitted, they sacked and burnt his house, and tried to murder

himself. The magistrates, afraid of exposing themselves to the fury of

such a mob, kept for the most part out of the way; and though the troops

had been put under arms, and several regiments from the rural districts

had been brought up to London in haste, the military officers were

afraid to act without orders. Left to work their pleasure almost without

resistance, the rioters attacked the different prisons, burnt Newgate

and released all the prisoners, and made more than one attack on the

Bank of England, where, however, fortunately the guard was strong enough

to repel them. But still no active measures were taken to crush the

riot. The belief was general that the soldiers might not act at all, or,

at all events, not fire on rioters, till an hour after the Riot Act had

been read and the mob had been warned to disperse; and no magistrate

could be found to brave its fury by reading it. There seemed no obstacle

to prevent the rioters from making themselves masters of the whole

capital, had it not been for the firmness of the King himself, who, when

all the proper authorities failed, showed himself in fact as well as in

name the Chief Magistrate of the kingdom.[70] He summoned a Privy

Council, and urged the members to adopt instant measures of repression;

and, when some of the ministers seemed to waver, he put the question

himself to the Attorney-general whether the interpretation put on the

Riot Act, which seemed to him inconsistent with common-sense, were

justified by the law. Wedderburn unhesitatingly replied that it was not;

that "if a mob were committing a felony, as by burning dwelling-houses,

and could not be prevented by other means, the military, according to

the law of England, might and ought to be immediately ordered to fire

upon them, the reading of the Riot Act being wholly unnecessary under

such circumstances."[71] The King insisted on this opinion being

instantly acted on; a proclamation was issued, and orders were sent from

the Adjutant-general's office that the soldiers were to act at once

without waiting for directions from the civil magistrates. A few hours

now sufficed to restore tranquillity. The Chief-justice, in his place in

the House of Lords, subsequently declared Wedderburn's opinion, and the

orders given in reliance upon it, to be in strict conformity with the

common law, laying down, as the principle on which such an

interpretation of the law rested, the doctrine that in such a case the

military were acting, "not as soldiers, but as citizens; no matter

whether their coats were red or brown, they were legally employed in

preserving the laws and the constitution;"[72] and Wedderburn, who

before the end of the year became Chief-justice of the Common Pleas,

repeated the doctrine more elaborately in a charge from the Bench. It

was a lesson of value to the whole community. It was quite true that the

constitution placed the army in a state of dependence on the civil

power. But, when that doctrine was so misunderstood as to be supposed to

give temporary immunity to outrage, it was most important that such a

misconstruction should be corrected, and that it should be universally

known that military discipline does not require the soldier to abstain

from the performance of the duty incumbent on every citizen, the

prevention of crime.

Notes:

[Footnote 33: It is worth while to preserve the amount, if for no other

reason, for the contrast that the expenditure and resources of the

kingdom a hundred years ago present to those of the present day. The

supply required in 1764 was in round numbers £7,712,000; in 1755, before

the war broke out, £4,073,000, and even that included a million for the

augmentation of the army and navy. In 1761, when the war was at its

height, the sum voted was £19,616,000.]

[Footnote 34: The report in the "Parliamentary History," xvi., 37, says:

"This act (the Stamp Act) passed the Commons almost without debate; two

or three members spoke against it, but without force or apparent

interest, except a vehement harangue from Colonel Barré (date, March 6,

1765)."]

[Footnote 35: Lord Stanhope ("History of England," v., 131) quotes a

letter of Dr. Franklin to one of his friends in America, in which, after

deploring the impossibility of preventing the act from being passed, he

expresses a hope that "frugality and industry will go a great way toward

indemnifying us." And he complied with Mr. Grenville's request to select

a person to act as Distributor of Stamps in Pennsylvania whom he thought

likely to be generally acceptable.]

[Footnote 36: These statements and arguments of Franklin are taken from

different parts of his examination before the House of Commons, as

preserved in the "Parliamentary History," xvi., 137-160.]

[Footnote 37: In the Assembly of Virginia, one of the members--Patrick

Henry--after declaiming with bitterness against the supposed arbitrary

measures of the present reign, exclaimed, "Caesar had his Brutus,

Charles I. his Oliver Cromwell, and George III.--" A cry of "Treason!"

was uttered. The Speaker called Mr. Henry to order, and declared he

would quit the chair unless he were supported by the House in

restraining such intemperate speeches.--Adolphus, _History of England_,

i., 188.]

[Footnote 38: On this point the law has been affirmed by a judge of high

reputation to be still what Lord Rockingham and his colleagues asserted.

In 1868, on the trial of Governor Eyre for an indictment arising out of

disturbances in Jamaica, Judge Blackburne laid it down "that, although

the general rule is that the Legislative Assembly has the sole right of

imposing taxes in the colony, yet, when the Imperial Legislature chooses

to impose taxes, according to the rule of English law they have a

_right_ to do it."]

[Footnote 39: See his speech on American taxation in April, 1774.]

[Footnote 40: The chief divisions were: in the Commons, 275 to 167; in

the Lords, 105 to 71.]

[Footnote 41: "History of England," vol. v., c. xlv., p. 218, ed. 1862.]

[Footnote 42: "Lives of the Chancellors," c. cxliii., life of Lord

Camden.]

[Footnote 43: Every political student will recollect Burke's description

of it as "a cabinet so variously inlaid, such a piece of diversified

mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement--here a bit of black

stone, there a bit of white--patriots and courtiers, King's friends and

republicans, Whigs and Tories, treacherous friends and open enemies,"

etc.--_Speech on American Taxation_.]

[Footnote 44: In a debate in the year 1776, on some measures adopted for

the conduct of the war, the Duke of Grafton said: "In that year (1767),

when the extraordinary expenses incurred on account of America were laid

before the House of Commons, the House rose as one man and insisted that

that country should contribute to the burdens brought on by the military

establishment there, and a motion was made for bringing in a bill for

that purpose. I strenuously opposed the measure, as big with the

consequences it has since, unfortunately, produced. I spoke to my

friends upon the occasion, but they all united in the opinion that the

tide was too strong to expect either to stem or turn it, so as to

prevent whatever might be offered in that shape from passing into a law.

Finding that all my efforts would be vain, I was compelled to submit,

but was resolved, as far as lay in my power, to prevent the effect; and,

while I gave way, to do it in such a manner as would cause the least

harm. I accordingly proposed the tea-duty as the most palatable;

because, though it answered the main purpose of those with whom taxation

was a favorite measure, it was doing America an immediate benefit, for I

procured the shilling a pound duty to be taken off, and threepence to be

laid on in lieu thereof; so that, in fact, it was ninepence a pound

saved to America. However, the attempt was received in America as I

expected it would be--it immediately caused disturbances and universal

dissatisfaction."--_Parliamentary History_, xviii., 134.]

[Footnote 45: This unpopularity had been aggravated by another measure

which was among the last acts of Mr. Grenville's ministry. The Mutiny

Act in the Colonies was renewed for two years at a time, and, at its

renewal in the spring of 1765, a clause was added which required the

Colonists to furnish the troops with "fire, candles, vinegar, salt,

bedding, utensils for cooking, and liquors, such as beer, cider, and

rum." The Assemblies of several States passed resolutions strongly

condemning this new imposition; but, as the dissatisfaction did not lead

to any overt acts of disturbance, it seems to have been unnoticed in

England at the time, or the clause would probably have been repealed by

Lord Rockingham; and eventually the Assembly of New York seems to have

withdrawn its objections to it, presenting an address to Sir H. Moore,

the Governor, in which "they declared their intention of making the

required provision for the troops."--Lord E. Fitzmaurice, _Life of Lord

Shelburne_, ii., 61.]

[Footnote 46: The "Memoirs of Judge Livingstone" record his expression

of opinion as early as 1773, that "it was intolerable that a continent

like America should be governed by a little island three thousand miles

distant." "America," said he, "must and will be independent." And in the

"Memoirs of General Lee" we find him speaking to Mr. Patrick Henry, who

in 1766 had been one of the most violent of all the denouncers of the

English policy (see _ante_, p. 63), of "independence" as "a golden

castle in the air which he had long dreamed of."]

[Footnote 47: See the whole speech, "Parliamentary History," xvi., 853.

Many of the taxes he denounced as so injurious to the British

manufacturers, "that it must astonish any reasonable man to think how so

preposterous a law could originally obtain existence from a British

Legislature."]

[Footnote 48: The division was: for the amendment, 142; against it,

204.]

[Footnote 49: The words of the "preamble," on which Burke dwelt in 1774,

were: "Whereas it is expedient that a revenue should be raised in your

Majesty's dominions in America for making a more certain and adequate

provision for defraying the charge of the administration of justice and

support of civil government in such provinces where it shall be found

necessary, and toward farther defraying the expenses of defending,

protecting, and securing: the said dominions, be it enacted," etc.]

[Footnote 50: "Memoirs and Correspondence of Jefferson." Quoted by Lord

Stanhope, "History of England," vi., 14.]

[Footnote 51: At Lexington, April 19, 1775.]

[Footnote 52: Lord Stanhope, however, has reason on his side when he

calls the words of this petition "vague and general," though "kindly and

respectful;" and when he points to the language of extreme bitterness

against England indulged in by Franklin at the very time that this

petition was voted. He, however, expresses a belief that even then "the

progress of civil war might have been arrested," which seems doubtful.

But it is impossible not to agree with his lordship in condemning the

refusal by the ministry to take any notice of the petition, on the

ground that the Congress was a self-constituted body, with no claim to

authority or recognition, and one which had already sanctioned the

taking up arms against the King.--_History of England_, vi., 93, 95,

105.]

[Footnote 53: It is probable, however, that the greater part of the

Hanoverian soldiers were Protestants.]

[Footnote 54: Lord Campbell, who, in his "Life of Lord Bathurst,"

asserts that the legality of the measure turns upon the just

construction of the Act of Settlement, adduces Thurlow's language on

this subject as "a proof that he considered that he had the privilege

which has been practised by other Attorney-generals and Chancellors too,

in debate, of laying down for law what best suited his purpose at the

moment." It does not seem quite certain that the noble and learned

biographer has not more than once in these biographies allowed himself a

similar license in the description of questions of party politics.]

[Footnote 55: In the debates on the subject it was stated that the

number of Hanoverians quartered in the two fortresses was nineteen

hundred, and the number of British troops left in them was two thousand.

Moreover, as has been already remarked, though Lord Shelburne spoke of

arming Roman Catholics, it is probable that the Hanoverians were mostly

Protestants.]

[Footnote 56: The Preliminary or Provisional Articles, as they were

called, of which the Definitive Treaty was but a copy, were signed at

Paris, November 30, 1782, during Lord Shelburne's administration. But

the Definitive Treaty was not signed till the 3d of September of the

following year, under the Coalition Ministry, which was turned out a few

weeks afterward.]

[Footnote 57: We shall see in a subsequent chapter that even in this

reign of George III. Pitt laid down the true principles of our

legislation for the colonies in his bill for the better government of

Canada.]

[Footnote 58: An admirably reasoned passage on the influence of the

crown, especially in the reigns of the two first Hanoverian Kings, will

be found in Hallam, "Constitutional History," c. xvi., vol. iii., p.

392, ed. 1832.]

[Footnote 59: The "Parliamentary History" shows that he had brought

forward the same motion before 1780; since Lord Nugent, who replied to

him, said "the same motion had been made for some years past, and had

been silently decided on." From which it seems that it was never

discussed at any length till May 8, 1780.]

[Footnote 60: On the division the numbers were: for the motion, 90;

against it, 182.]

[Footnote 61: The division in 1782 was: 161 to 141; in 1783, 293 to

149.]

[Footnote 62: How systematic and open bribery was at this time is shown

by an account of Sheridan's expenses at Stafford in 1784, of which the

first item is--248 burgesses, paid £5 5s. each, £1302.--Moore's _Life of

Sheridan_, i., 405.]

[Footnote 63: "Life of Pitt," i., 359.]

[Footnote 64: Lord North was a Knight of the Garter, the only commoner,

except Sir R. Walpole, who received that distinction in the last

century, and the latest, with the exception of Lord Castlereagh. on whom

it has been conferred.]

[Footnote 65: 233 to 315.]

[Footnote 66: It is perhaps worth pointing out, as a specimen of the

practical manner in which parliamentary business was transacted at that

time, that this great debate--in which (the House being in committee)

Mr. Dunning himself spoke three times, and Lord North, Mr. T. Pitt, Mr.

Fox, the Speaker (Sir F. Norton), the Attorney-general, General Conway,

Governor Pownall, the Lord-advocate, and several other members took

part--was concluded by twelve o'clock.]

[Footnote 67: February 8, 1780, on Lord Shelburne's motion for an

inquiry into the public expenditure.--_Parliamentary History_, xx.,

1346.]

[Footnote 68: 101 to 55.]

[Footnote 69: "Constitutional History," iii., 43.]

[Footnote 70: His language is said to have been that "there was at all

events one Magistrate in the kingdom who would do his duty."--Lord

Stanhope, _History of England_, vii., 48.]

[Footnote 71: "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," c. clxvii.]

[Footnote 72: Lord Stanhope's "History of England," vii, 56.]