Act: did America then receive this boon of cheerfully? Disturbances have been fomenting and growing ever since. Some few years past you repealed three or four of these taxes; I wish much the debate on this question had then been agitated. The question now is, whether it is prudent to repeal this tax at this critical juncture? The Americans say, restore us to the same situation we were in before the Stamp Act passed. Suppose we do, we put them in a worse situation than they are now in. The consumer of a pound of tea before that Act took place paid twelve-pence, by this Act he pays only three-pence, the consumer therefore certainly gains nine-pence by every pound he uses. This tax upon tea is certainly not uncommercial, because tea is much cheaper now than before; and therefore I think it cannot have any aspect of grievance as a commercial tax. What, then, are we to expect, if we shew such a pusillanimous timidity in repealing this tax, merely because they object to it? On the question of right, they will certainly consider us in a more contemptuous light than they ever yet did. Let me ask what answer will they give, when, after this, the Americans shall voluntarily apply to repeal the duty on wine, &c.? The same principle that operates for the repeal of this, will go to that. I do not see What answer you can give, nor where the complaint is likely to stop, until you have given up the whole, and, by that means, America itself. If you persist in the measures you have begun with, I think there is not a doubt of your succeeding, and of becoming, if I may use the word, victorious; but I would have this victory obtained by a firm, consistent, just, and manly conduct. I do not see what line of discrimination you can draw; for many parts of America have, in a measure, disobeyed the precepts of this country, and behaved much in the same manner as Boston. It has been said, and it is a doctrine I readily agree to, that you ought to twine the olive branch round the sword; but if, Sir, they will return to their duty as they ought to do, the sword will have no edge. Let us not give way to false conceits, or factious proceedings; be calm, and persist in a just conduct. Deep as our debt is "on account of America, you will be deprived of a fourth part of the revenue, in the day when the system of taxation will be found necessary for carrying on the supplies of war, and the exigencies of Government; and when business must be stopt, without some resource of supply, there will not then be found two voices about taxing America.

Mr. Edmund Burke. Sir, I agree with the honorable gentleman who spoke last, that this subject is not new in this House. Very disagreeably to this House, very unfortunately to this nation, and to the peace and prosperity of this whole empire, no topic has been more familiar to us. For nine long years, session after session, we have been lashed round and round this miserable circle of occasional arguments arid temporary expedients. I am sure our heads must turn, and our stomachs nauseate with them. We have had them in every shape; we have looked at them in every point of view. Invention is exhausted; reason is fatigued; experience has given judgment; but obstinacy is not yet conquered.

The honorable gentleman has made one endeavour more to diversify the form of this disgusting argument. He has thrown out a speech composed almost entirely of challenges. Challenges are serious things; and as he is a man of prudence as well as resolution, I dare say he has very well weighed those challenges before he delivered them. I had long the happiness to sit at the same side of the House, and to agree with the honorable gentleman on all the American questions. My sentiments, I am sure, are well known to him; and I thought I had been perfectly acquainted with his. Though I find myself mistaken, he will still permit me to use the privilege of an old friendship; he will permit me to apply myself to the House under the sanction of his authority; and, on the various grounds he has measured out, to submit to you the poor opinions which I have formed, upon a matter of importance enough to demand the fullest consideration I could Bestow upon it.

He has stated to the House two grounds of deliberation; one narrow and simple, and merely confined to the question on your paper; the other more large and more complicated; comprehending the whole of the Parliamentary proceedings with regard to America, their causes, and their consequences. With regard to the latter ground, he states it as useless, and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter into so extensive a field of inquiry. Yet, to my surprise, he had hardly laid down this restrictive proposition, to which his authority would have given so much weight, when directly, and with the same authority, he condemns it, and declares it absolutely necessary to enter into the most ample historical detail. His zeal has thrown him a little out of his usual accuracy. In this perplexity what shall we do, Sir, who are willing to submit to the law he gives us? He has reprobated in one part of his speech the rule he gad laid down for debate in the other; and, after narrowing the ground for all those who are to speak after him, he takes an excursion himself, as unbounded as the subject 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 such of them as have the sanction of his example, and to stick to that rule which, though not consistent with the other, is the most rational. He was certainly in the right when he took the matter largely. I cannot prevail on myself to agree with him in his censure of his own conduct, It is not, he w ill give me leave to say, either useless or dangerous. He asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the only proper, subject of inquiry is, "not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it." In other words, we are, according to him, to consult our invention, and to reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule of reason, and every principle of good sense established amongst mankind. For that sense and that reason, I have always understood, absolutely to prescribe, whenever we are involved in difficulties from the measures we have pursued, that we should take a strict review of those measures, in order to correct our errors if they should be corrigible; or at least to avoid a dull uniformity in mischief, and the unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare.

Sir, I will freely follow the honorable gentleman in his historical discussion, without the least management for men or measures, further than as they shall seem to me to deserve it. But before I go into that large consideration, because I would omit nothing that can give the House satisfaction, I wish to tread the narrow ground to which alone the honorable gentleman, in one part of his speech, has so strictly confined us.

He desires to know, whether, if we were to repeal this tax, agreeably to the proposition of the honorable gentleman who made the motion, the Americans would not take post on this concession, in order to make a new attack on the next body of taxes; and whether they would not call for a repeal of the duty on wine as loudly as they do now for the repeal of the duty on tea? Sir, I can give no security on this subject. But I will do all that I can, and all that can be fairly demanded. To the experience which the honorable gentleman reprobates in one instant, and reverts to in the next, to that experience, without the least wavering or hesitation on my part, I steadily appeal; and would to God there was no other arbiter to decide on the vote with which the House is to conclude this day!

When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the year 1766, I affirm, first, that the Americans did not in consequence of this measure call upon you to give up the former Parliamentary revenue which subsisted in that country, or even any one of the articles which compose it. I affirm also, that when, departing from the maxims of that repeal, you revived the scheme of taxation, and thereby filled the minds of the Colonists with new jealousy, and all sorts of apprehensions, then it was that they quarreled, with the old taxes, as well as the new; then it was, and not till then, that they questioned all the parts of your legislative power; and, by the battery of such questions, have shaken the solid structure of this empire to its deepest foundations.

Of those two propositions I shall, before I have done, give such convincing, such damning proof, that however the contrary may be whispered in circles, or bawled in newspapers, they never more will dare to raise their voices in this House. I speak with great confidence. I have reason for it. The Ministers are with me. They