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upon the Bills of your Assemblies, in the same way that it has upon the Bills of our Lords and Commons, will secure us sufficiently against innovations.
The only remaining general subject of contest, so far as we can see, is the power of the Grown to send Troops amongst you without consent of your Assemblies. Per haps even this delicate point might be adjusted: for you have as much an interest to be defended, as we have to defend, you. On your part it might be, yielded, that a certain number of British Forces should be supported in America without consent of the Assemblies; and on ours, that no more should be sent except in times of war or actual rebellion.
If these great Commercial, Judicial, Legislative, and Military arrangements were agreed upon, we might leave the provision for them to yourselves; or at least be contented with a standing Revenue, to be now ascertained between your Assemblies and Parliament. For though we give up the disgraceful and odious privilege of taxing you, you cannot be ignorant that you must establish Revenues, as all other countries do to support your establishments.
The deluded amongst you think that we assume airs of superiority over you, even where they are needless. Far from it every honour of this country is open to you. We should even be happy to see you ask the establishment of a nobility, and of ranks among yourselves, that your spirits might not only be inflamed by the love of liberty, but exalted by the love of family. The whole history of man-kind presents not a state of society, notwithstanding all the imperfections it is charged with, so fraught with liberty safety, wealth, and honour, as that of England is. Approach to it-fly not from it. All human kind envy it. Reject not you what others pray for from Heaven.
With such sentiments of kindness in our breasts towards you, and we hope in yours towards us, we cannot, in the reign of the most virtuous of Princes hear, without the deepest concern, a charge made in the Addresses of your Congress, that a system has been formed and pursued in the reign of that Prince, to enslave you by means of Parliament; and we wish it had not been added, as a previous step to enslave us.
To vindicate the proceedings of Parliament where they ought not to blamed, and to point out where perhaps they may without difficulty be amended, is the best way to expose the fallacy of that charge, and at the same time to show you how easy it is to remove such remaining subjects of difference between us, as have not yet been taken notice of in this Address.
It is a cruel mistake for you, ninety-nine of an hundred of whom must be unacquainted with the history of laws to be made be that there were no Statutes before the reign of his present Majesty, which imposed taxes on any part of the American Dominions. Those who tell you there were none, know full well there, were many ancestors complained of some of them, as all men do of all taxes, but they never disputed the power of Parliament. to impose them.*
The last war was begun for the sake of English America. It was terminated by a security gained for it at the peace which imagination itself could not have hoped for England was loaded with an immense publick debt, contracted in this great American cause. By the peace a new system was created in America, and an Empire set in motion, which it was obvious could not be supported without a regular Revenue. At this period, Mr. Grenville became the Minister of England, not so much perhaps from the choice of Government, as from the force of opposition which obliged another Minister to give way to him. Mr. Grenville's life of labour had been spent in attion to the finances of the British Empire; those finances which, next to the enjoyment of liberty, do above all other, things give the superiority to Britain above, all other Nations. At such a period, had such a Minister proposed to make America liable for that part of the publick debt of England which had been contracted in defending her, it would be, ungenerous to his memory, to impute his doing so to a design of enslaving America, in order to enslave his own country;—that country, the care of whose rights employed even his latest hours. But he carried not his views so far as to subject America to a share of the burden even of that debt, and much less of the other debts of England. He only prevailed upon Parliament, in the fourth year of the King, to impose taxes upon sundry foreign commodities imported into America, the produce of which taxes was to be spent in the Colonies, and confined to the service of the Colonies; and these taxes were external ones, that is to say, Port Duties, which every one might avoid by not importing the Goods on which they were laid, or not buying them when imported. No American complained of this at the time as an imposition of slavery. You paid the taxes as your ancestors had done other necessary ones. If, in imposing these taxes, he erred in opinion Concerning a matter of right, you erred against it too; for you call it not in question. If errour was venial in you, why was it criminal in him? It is hard that you should now convert into a scheme to enslave you, what you then deemed consistent with your freedom.
In the succeeding year the same Minister, on the same principles of giving security to a new and growing Empire the machine of which could not even stand, and much less move without Revenues to support it, prevailed upon Parliament to pass the Stamp Act. The produce of the Duties was by the Act to be spent in the Colonies, and applied solely to their service.
America clamoured against this last Act. These clamours originated among the Lawyers there, whom the tax chiefly affected, and they were taken up in England by the opposers of the Minister;—two classes of men, the first of whom, by their profession, have always the abilities, and the other in the pursuit of their ambition, the interest to disseminate clamour. But in these clamours, extensive as they afterwards became, though flowing from nature and kept up by art, no American made an objection to the right of England to impose external Duties upon America. You called for the repeal of the Stamp Act, which imposed internal Duties; but you did not ask the repeal of the Port Duties which had the year before been laid upon you.
Lord Rockingham's Administration, which rose on the ruin of Mr. Grenville's, repealed the Stamp Act, but did not repeal the Act which had imposed the Port Duties We do not pry with a jaundiced eye into the motives of that Administration for the first of those, measures; we impute them to the best motives, because we believe that there are in a party, of which his Lordship is the leader, men of Spanish honour and Roman virtue; although we must tell you, that you deceive yourselves grossly when you look up to persons as the only asserters of American liberty who took off only one of what you call your chains, but left the other fast on your necks. But if you incline to pay compliments to an Administration which we do not complain of it is rather unfair in you to refuse them to that Prince by whose nod alone they were permitted to do any thing. If there has been a system in the present reign to enslave you, the repeal even of one of those two Statutes affords an instance that it was not very systematically pursued.
Soon after this repeal Lord Rockingham's Administration got an Act of Parliament passed, which declared the supremacy of Parliament over America, in all cases what soever. You cannot convert this Statute into a link of the chain which you think is intended to enthral you, when you reflect that it was forged by those whom your Congress and yourselves look upon as the great asserters of your liberty.
As you had not hitherto claimed a right of exemption from the power of Parliament to impose external taxes upon you, Ministers could not think of rights which your selves had never dreamed of. In the Ministry which succeeded to that of Lord Rockingham, an Act of Parliament was passed, in the seventh year of the King, which laid Port Duties in America upon some other objects of commerce than those which were contained in Mr. Grenvillet's first Act of the fourth of the King. This Act was so little a link in the chain of system against you, that all those who were then the King's Ministers have since denied in full Parliament all concern in the fabrick of it; and they are entitled to credit, because they are now engaged in different parties, and each would lay the blame on his neighbour if he could with any truth. It was at the time notorious to all, that the project of the Act was
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