This country cannot be said to have ever formally taxed her, The irregular things done in the confusion of mighty troubles, and on the hinge of great revolutions, even if all were done that is said to have been done, form no example. If they have any effect in argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them, at such times, were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the Staled and fixed rule of supply has been in that Kingdom. Your Irish Pensioners would starve, if they had no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority. Turn your eyes to those popular grants, from whence all your great supplies are come, and learn to respect that only source of publick wealth in the British Empire.

My next example is Wales. This country was said to be reduced by Henry the Third. It was said more truly, to be so by Edward the First. But though then conquered, it was not looked upon as any part of the Realm of England. Its old Constitution, whatever that might have been, was destroyed; and no good one was substituted in its place. The care of that tract was put into the hands of Lords' Marchers—a form of Government of a very singular kind—a strange heterogeneous monster, something between hostility and government; perhaps it has a sort of resemblance, according to the modes of those times, to that of Commander-in-Chief at present, to whom all civil power is granted as secondary. The manners of the Welsh Nation followed the genius of the Government; the people were ferocious, restiff, savage, and uncultivated; sometimes composed, never pacified. Wales, within itself, was in perpetual disorder; and it kept the frontier of England in perpetual alarm. Benefits from it to the state, there were none. Wales was only known to England by incursion and invasion.

Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. They attempted to subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by all sorts of rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of Arms into Wales, as you prohibit by Proclamation (with something more of doubt on the legality,) the sending Arms to America. They disarmed the Welsh by Statute, as you attempted, (but still with more question on the legality,) to disarm New England by an instruction? They made an Act to drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have done (but with mole hardship) with regard to America. By another Act, where one of the parties was an Englishman, they ordained, that his trial should be always by English. They made Acts to restrain trade, as you do; and they prevented the Welsh from the use of Fairs and Markets, as you do the Americans from Fisheries and Foreign Ports. In short, When the Statute-Book was not quite so much swelled as it is now, you find no less than fifteen Acts of penal regulation the subject of Wales.

Here we rub our hands—a fine body of precedents for the authority of Parliament and the use of it!—I admit it fifty; and, pray, add likewise to those precedents, that all the while, Wales rid this Kingdom like an incubus; that it was aft unprofitable and oppressive burthen; and that an Englishman travelling in that country, could not go six yards from the high road, without being murdered.

The march of the human mind is slow. Sir, it was not, until after two hundred years, discovered, that, by an eternal Providence had decreed vexation to violence, and poverty to rapine. Your ancestors did, however, at length open their eyes to the ill husbandry of injustice. They found that the tyranny of a free people could, of all tyrannies, the least be endured, and that laws made against a whole nation were not the most effectual methods for securing its obedience. Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of Henry the Eighth, the course was entirely altered. With a preamble, stating the entire and perfect rights of the Crown of England, it gave to the Welsh all the rights and privileges of English subjects. A political order was established; the military power gave way to the civil: the Marches were turned into Counties. But, that a Nation should have a right to English liberties, and yet no share at all in the fundamental security of these liberties the grant of their own property seemed a thing so incongruous, that eight years after, that is, in the thirty-fifth of that reign, a complete and not ill-proportioned representation by Counties and Boroughs, was bestowed upon Wales by Act of Parliament. From that moment, as by a charm, the tumult subsided; obedience was restored; peace, order, and civilization, followed in the train of liberty. When the daystar of the English Constitution had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and without—

"Simul alba nautis

Stella refulsit,

Defluit saxis agitatus humor:

Concidunt venti, fugiúintque nubes:

Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto

Uuda recumbit."

The very same year the County Palatine of Chester received the same relief from its oppressions, and the same remedy to its disorders. Before this time Chester was little less distempered than Wales. The inhabitants, without rights themselves, were the fittest to destroy the rights of others; and from thence Richard the Second drew the Standing Army of Archers, with which, for a time, he oppressed England. The people of Chester applied to Parliament in a Petition penned as I shall read to you:

"To the King our Sovereign Lord, in most humble wise shewn unto your excellent Majesty, the inhabitants of your Grace's County Palatine of Chester; that where the said County Palatine of Chester is and hath been always hitherto exempt, excluded, and separated out and from your high Court of Parliament, to have any Knights and Burgesses within the said Court; by reason whereof the said inhabitants have hitherto sustained manifold disherisons, losses, and damages, as well in their Lands, Goods, and Bodies, as in the good, civil, and politick governance and maintenance of the commonwealth of their said country: (2.) And for as much as the said inhabitants have always hitherto been bound by the Acts and Statutes made and ordained by your said Highness, and your most noble progenitors, by authority of the said Court, as far forth as other Counties, Cities, and Boroughs have been, that have had their Knights and Burgesses within your said Court of Parliament, and yet have had neither Knight nor Burgess there for the said County Palatine; the said inhabitants, for lack thereof, have been often times touched and grieved with Acts and Statutes made within the said Court, as well derogatory unto the most ancient jurisdictions, liberties, and privileges of your said County Palatine, as prejudicial unto the Commonwealth, quietness, rest, and peace of your Grace's most bounden subjects inhabiting within the same."

What did Parliament with this audacious Address? Reject it as a libel? Treat it as an affront to Government? Spurn it as a derogation from the rights of Legislature? Did they toss it over the table? Did they burn it by the hands of the common hangman? They took the Petition of grievance, all rugged as it was, without softening or temperament, unpurged of the original bitterness and indignation of complaint; they made it the very preamble to their act of redress, and consecrated its principle to all ages in the sanctuary of legislation.

Here is my third example. It was attended with the success of the two former. Chester, civilized as well as Wales, has demonstrated that freedom, and not servitude, is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition. Sir, this pattern of Chester was followed in the reign of Charles the Second, with regard to the County Palatine of Durham, which is my fourth example. This County had long lain out of the pale of free legislation. So scrupulously was the example of Chester followed, that the style of the preamble is nearly the same with that of the Chester Act; and without affecting the abstract extent of the authority of Parliament, it recognizes the equity of not suffering any considerable district in which the British subjects may act as a body, to be taxed without their own voice in the grant.

Now, if the doctrines of policy contained in these preambles, and the force of these examples in the Acts of Parliaments, avail any thing, what can be said against applying them with regard to America? Are not the people of America as; much Englishmen as the Welsh the preamble of the Act of Henry the Eighth says, the Welsh speak a language no way resembling that of his Majesty's English subjects. Are the Americans not as numerous?