I desire to know, when were they made slaves? But I dwell not upon words. When I had the honour of serving his Majesty, I availed myself of the means of information which I derived from my office. I speak, therefore, from knowledge. My materials were good. I was at pains to collect, to digest, to consider them; and I will be bold to affirm that the profits to Great Britain from the trade of the colonies, through all its branches, is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war. The estates that were rented at two thousand pounds a year, threescore years ago,are at three thousand at present. Those estates sold then from fifteen to eighteen years' purchase; the same may now be sold for thirty. You owe this to America. This is the price America pays you for her protection. And shall a miserable financier come with a boast that he can bring "a pepper-corn" into the exchequer by the loss of millions to the nation? I dare not say how much higher these profits may be augmented. Omitting the immense increase of people, by natural population, in the northern colonies, and the emigration from every part of Europe, I am convinced on other grounds that the commercial system of America may be altered to advantage. You have prohibited where you ought to have encouraged. You have encouraged where you ought to have prohibited. Improper restraints have been laid on the continent in favour of the islands. You have but two nations to trade with in America. Would you had twenty! Let acts of Parliament in consequence of treaties remain; but let not an English minister become a custom-house officer for Spain, or for any foreign power. Much is wrong! Much may be amended for the general good of the whole...

A great deal has been said without doors of the power, of the strength of America. It is a topic that ought to be cautiously meddled with. In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this country can crush America to atoms. I know the valour of your troops. I know the skill of your officers. There is not a company of foot that has served in America, out of which you may not pick a man of sufficient knowledge and experience to make a governor of a colony there. But on this ground, on the Stamp Act, which so many here will think a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my hands against it.

In such a cause, your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man; she

would embrace the pillars of the State, and pull down the Constitution along with her. Is this your boasted peacenot to sheathe the sword in its scabbard, but to sheathe it in the bowels of your countrymen? Will you quarrel with yourselves, now the whole house of Bourbon is united against you: while France disturbs your fisheries in Newfoundland, embarrasses your slave trade to Africa, and withholds from your subjects in Canada their property stipulated by treaty: while the ransom for the Manillas is denied by Spain, and its gallant conqueror basely traduced into a mean plunderer; a gentleman whose noble and generous spirit would do honour to the proudest grandee of the country? The Americans have not acted in all things with prudence and temper; they have been wronged; they have been driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned? Rather let prudence and temper come first from this side. I will undertake for America that she will follow the example. There are two lines in a ballad of Prior's, of a man's behaviour to his wife, so applicable to you and your colonies that I cannot help repeating them:

"Be to her faults a little blind;

Be to her virtues very kind."

Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House what is my opinion. It is, that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately. That the reason for the repeal be assigned, namely, because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time, let the sovereign authority of this country over the colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, and be made to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever; that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever, except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent.

(British Orations, ed. cit., I, 113.)

204. The Right to Tax

Mansfield

In the speech from which the following selections have been made, Lord Mansfield delivered a most able argument upon the purely legal aspect of the question of taxing the colonies. The speech was declared by one of his opponents to be absolutely uncontrovertible as an argument on the law of the question at

issue.

There can be no doubt, my Lords, but that the inhabitants

of the colonies are as much represented in Parliament as the greatest part of the people of England are represented; among nine millions of whom there are eight which have no votes in electing members of Parliament. Every objection, therefore, to the dependency of the colonies upon Parliament, which arises to it upon the ground of representation, goes to the whole present Constitution of Great Britain, and I suppose it is not meant to new-model that too. People may form speculative ideas of perfection, and indulge their own fancies or those of other men. Every man in this country has his particular notion of liberty; but perfection never did, and never can, exist in any human institution. To what purpose, then, are arguments drawn from a distinction — in which there is no real difference of a virtual and actual representation? A member of Parliament, chosen for any borough, represents not only the inhabitants and constituents 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 this 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.

I have mentioned the customs and the post tax. This leads me to answer another distinction, as false as the above: the distinction of internal and external taxes. The noble Lord who quoted so much law and denied upon those grounds the right of the Parliament of Great Britain to lay internal taxes upon the colonies, allowed at the same time that restrictions upon trade and duties upon the ports were legal. But I cannot see a real difference in this distinction; for I hold it to be true that a tax laid in any place is like a pebble falling into and making a circle in a lake, till one circle produces and gives motion to another and the whole circumference is agitated from the centre. For nothing can be more clear than that a tax of ten or twenty per cent. laid upon tobacco, either in the ports of Virginia or London, is a duty laid upon the inland plantations of Virginia, a hundred miles from the sea, wheresoever the tobacco grows.

I do not deny but that a tax may be laid injudiciously and injuriously, and that people in such a case may have a right to complain. But the nature of the tax is not now the question; whenever it comes to be one, I am for lenity. I would have no blood drawn. There is, I am satisfied, no occasion for any to be drawn. A little time and experience of the in

conveniences and miseries of anarchy may bring people to their senses...

I am far from bearing any ill-will to the Americans; they are a very good people, and I have long known them. I began life with them, and owe much to them, having been much concerned in the plantation causes before the Privy Council; and so I became a good deal acquainted with American affairs and people. I dare say their heat will soon be over, when they come to feel a little the consequences of their opposition to the Legislature. Anarchy always cures itself; but the ferment will continue so much the longer while hotheaded men there find that there are persons of weight and character to support and justify them here.

Indeed, if the disturbances should continue for a great length of time, force must be the consequence, an application adequate to the mischief and arising out of the necessity of the case; for force is only the difference between a superior and subordinate jurisdiction. In the former the whole force of the Legislature resides collectively, and when it ceases to reside the whole connection is dissolved. It will, indeed, be to very little purpose that we sit here enacting laws and making resolutions, if the inferior will not obey them, or if we neither can nor dare enforce them; for then - and then, I say, of necessity- the matter comes to the sword. If the offspring are grown too big and too resolute to obey the parent, you must try which is the strongest, and exert all the powers of the mother country to decide the contest.

I am satisfied, notwithstanding, that time, and a wise and steady conduct, may prevent those extremities which would be fatal to both. I remember well when it was the violent humour of the times to decry standing armies and garrisons as dangerous and incompatible with the liberty of the subject. Nothing would do but a regular militia. The militia are embodied; they march; and no sooner was the militia law thus put into execution, but it was then said to be an intolerable burden upon the subject, and that it would fall, sooner or later, into the hands of the Crown. That was the language, and many counties petitioned against it. This may be the case with the colonies. In many places they begin already to feel the effects of their resistance to government. Interest very soon divides mercantile people; and, although there may be some mad, enthusiastic, or ill-designing people in the colonies, yet I am convinced that the greatest bulk, who have understanding and property, are still well affected

to the mother country. You have, my Lords, many friends still in the colonies; and take care that you do not, by abdicating your own authority, desert them and yourselves, and lose them forever...

But, my Lords, I shall make this application of it. You may abdicate your right over the colonies. Take care, my Lords, how you do so; for such an act will be irrevocable. Proceed, then, my Lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you shall have established your authority, it will then be a time to show your lenity. The Americans, as I said before, are a very good people, and I wish them exceedingly well; but they are heated and inflamed. The noble Lord who spoke before ended with a prayer. I cannot end better than by saying to it, Amen; and in the words of Maurice, Prince of Orange, concerning the Hollanders, "God bless this industrious, frugal, and well-meaning, but easily deluded people!"

(British Orations, ed. cit., I, 161.)

205. The Character of the Colonists

Burke

The great Irish orator, Edmund Burke, was a warm advocate of the American cause. In his most noted speech on the subject, he voiced the opinion general in England, though not in Parliament, that the love of liberty would call the colonists to great deeds if they were driven to desperation. His words form a just and comprehensive summing-up of the judgment of the most intelligent Englishmen of that day.

But there is still behind a third consideration concerning this object, which serves to determine my opinion on the sort of policy which ought to be pursued in the management of America, even more than its population and its commerce I mean its character and temper. In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature, which marks and distinguishes the whole; and, as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth; and this from a variety of powerful causes, which, to understand the true temper of their minds and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.