URING the laft Seffion of the laft Parliament, on the 19th of April, 1774, Mr. Rofe Fuller, Member for Rye, made the following Motion; That an Act made in the feventh Year of the reign of his prefent Majefty, intituled, "An Act for granting

"certain Duties in the British Colonies and "Plantations in America; for allowing a "Drawback of the Duties of Cuftoms upon "the Exportation from this Kingdom of Coffee "and Cocoa Nuts, of the Produce of the faid "Colonies or Plantations; for difcontinuing "the Drawbacks payable on China Earthen "Ware exported to America; and for more "effectually preventing the clandeftine Running of Goods in the faid Colonies and Plantations" might be read.

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And the fame being read accordingly; He moved, That this Houfe will, upon this day fevennight, refolve itfelf into a Committee of "the whole House, to take into confideration "the duty of 3 d. per pound weight upon tea, "payable in all his Majefty's Dominions in "America, imposed by the faid Act; and also "the appropriation of the faid duty."

On this latter motion a warm and interefting debate arofe, in which Mr. Edmund Burke fpoke as follows:

SIR,

Agree with the Honourable Gentleman * who fpoke laft, that this fubject is not new in this Houfe. Very difagreeably to this Houfe, very unfortunately to this Nation, and to the peace and profperity of this whole Empire, no For nine topic has been more familiar to us. long years, feffion after feffion, we have been lafhed round and round this miferable circle of occafional arguments and temporary expedients. I am fure our heads muft turn, and our ftomachs naufeate with them. We have had them in every fhape; we have looked at them in every point of view. Invention is exhaustcd; reafon is fatigued; experience has given

* Charles Wolfran Cornwall, Efq; lately appointed one of the

Lords of the Treasury.

judgement:

judgement: but obftinacy is not yet con quered.

The Hon. Gentleman has made one endeavour more to diverfify the form of this difgufting argument. He has thrown out a fpeech compofed almost entirely of challenges. Challenges are ferious things; and as he is a man of prudence as well as refolution, I dare fay he has very well weighed those challenges before he delivered them. I had long the happiness to fit at the fame fide of the House, and to agree with the Hon. Gentleman on all the American queftions. My fentiments, I am fure, are well known to him; and I thought I had been perfectly acquainted with his. Though I find myself mistaken, he will ftill permit me to use the privilege of an old friendship; he will permit me to apply myself to the Houfe under the fanction of his authority; and, on the various grounds he has meafured out, to fubmit to you the poor opinions which I have formed, upon a matter of importance enough to demand the fulleft confideration I could beftow upon it.

He has ftated to the Houfe two grounds of deliberation; one narrow and fimple, and merely confined to the queftion on your paper: the other more large and more complicated; comprehending the whole feries of the parliamentary proceedings with regard to America, their caufes, and their confequences. With regard to the latter ground, he ftates it as ufelefs, A 4

and

and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter into fo extensive a field of enquiry. Yet, to my furprize, he had hardly laid down this reftrictive propofition, to which his authority would have given fo much weight, when directly, and with the fame authority, he condemns it; and declares it abfolutely neceflary to enter into the most ample hiftorical detail. His zeal has thrown him a little out of his ufual accuracy. In this perplexity what fhall we do, Sir, who are willing to fubmit to the law he gives us? He has reprobated in one part of his fpeech the rule he had laid down for debate in the other; and, after narrowing the ground for all thofe who are to speak after him, he takes an excurfion himself, as unbounded as, the fubject and the extent of his great abilities.

Sir, When I cannot obey all his laws, I will do the best I can. I will endeavour to obey fuch of them as have the fanction of his example; and to flick to that rule, which, though not confiftent with the other, is the moft rational. He was certainly in the right when he took the matter largely. I cannot prevail on myself to agree with him in his cenfure of his own conduct. It is not, he will give me leave to fay, either ufelefs or dangerous. He afferts, that retrospect is not wife; and the proper, the only proper, fubject of enquiry is, not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it.

In

In other words, we are, according to him, to confult our invention, and to reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically oppofite to every rule of reafon, and every principle of good fenfe eftablished amongst mankind. For, that fense and that reafon, I have always understood, abfolutely to prefcribe, whenever we are involved in difficulties from the meafures we have purfued, that we should take a ftrict review of those measures, in order to correct our errors if they should be corrigible; or at least to avoid a dull uniformity in mifchief, and the unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the fame fnare.

Sir, I will freely follow the Hon. Gentleman in his hiftorical difcuffion, without the leaft management for men or measures, further than as they fhall feem to me to deferve it. But before I go into that large confideration, because I would omit nothing that can give the Houfe fatisfaction, I wish to tread the narrow ground to which alone the Hon. Gentleman, in one part of his fpeech, has fo ftrictly confined us.

He defires to know, whether, if we were to repeal this tax, agreeably to the propofition of the Hon. Gentleman who made the motion, the Americans would not take poft on this' conceffion, in order to make a new attack on the next body of taxes; and whether they

would