to serve his majesty, to propose to me to burn my fingers with an American stamp act. With the enemy at their back, with our bayonets at their breasts, in the day of their distress, perhaps the Americans would have submitted to the imposition; but it would have been taking an ungenerous, an unjust advantage. The gentleman boasts of his bounties to America! Are not these bounties intended finally for the benefit of this kingdom? If they are not, he has misapplied the national treasures. I am no courtier of America, I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that the parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America.

Our legislative power over the colonies is supreme. When it ceases to be sovereign and supreme, I would advise every gentleman to sell his lands, if he can, and embark for that country. Where two countries are connected together like England and her colonies, without being incorporated, the one must necessarily govern; the greater must rule the less; but so rule it, as not to contradict the fundamental principles that are common to both. If the gentleman does not understand the difference between external and internal taxes, I cannot help it; but there is a plain distinction between taxes levied for the purposes of raising a revenue, and duties imposed for the regulation of trade, for the accommodation of the subject; although, in the consequences, some revenue might incidentally arise from the latter. The Gentleman asks, when were the colonies emancipated? But 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, three score years ago, are at three thousand at present. Those estates sold then from fifteen to eighteen years purchase; the same may be now sold for thirty.

You owe this to America. This is the price that America pays you for her protection. And shall a miserable financier come with a boast, that he can fetch a pepper-corn into the exchequer, to the loss of a million 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 nothern colo. nies, and the migration from every part of Europe, I am convinced the whole 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.

Does the gentleman complain he has been misrepresented in the public prints? It is a common misfortune. In the Spanish affair of the last war, I was abused in all the newspapers, for having advised his majesty to violate the laws of nations with regard to Spain. The abuse was industriously circulated even in handbills.. If administration did not propagate the abuse, administration never contradicted it. I will not say what advice I did give to the king. My advice is in writing, signed by myself, in the possession of the crown. But I will say what advice I did not give to the king: I did not advise him to violate any of the laws of nations.

As to the report of the gentleman's preventing in some way the trade for bullion with the Spaniards, it was spoken of so confidently that I own I am one of those VOL. II.

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who did believe it to be true. The gentleman must not wonder he was not contradicted, when, as the minister, he asserted the right of parliament to tax America. I know not how it is, but there is a modesty in this house which does not choose to contradict a minister. Even your chair, sir, looks too often towards St. James's. I wish gentlemen would get the better of this modesty : if they do not, perhaps the collective body may begin to abate of its respect for the representative. Lord Ba con has told me, that a great question would not fail of being agitated at one time or another. I was willing to agitate that at the proper season, the German war:-my German war they called it. Every sessions I called out, Has any body any objection to the German war? Nobody would object to it, one gentleman only excepted, since removed to the upper house by succession to an ancient barony, (meaning lord Le Despencer, formerly Sir Francis Dashwood.) He told me, "He did not like a German war." I honoured the man for it, and was sorry when he was turned out of his post. 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 peace-not 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 (colonel Draper) 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 really my opinion. It is, that the stamp act be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately. That the reason for the repeal be assigned 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.

WILLIAM MURRAY,

(EARL OF MANSFIELD,)

Was the fourth son of the earl of Stormont, and born at Perth in 1705. He was educated at Westminster school, and afterwards at Oxford, where he took his degrees. On being called to the bar, his eloquence gained him many admirers; and he was called by Pope "the silver-tongued Murray." In 1742, he became solicitor-general, and was elected member of parliament. In 1754, he was made attorney-general, and in 1756, chief justice of the king's bench, soon after which he was created baron Mansfield. He resigned his office in 1788, owing to his infirmities, and died in 1793. The reputation which he acquired, both as a lawyer and a speaker, was not unmerited. I believe his character has been in all respects as justly appreciated as that of most men. He was undoubtedly a man of great abilities and great acquirements; but he was neither a very great nor a very honest man. He was a man of nice perceptions, of an acute and logical understanding, of a clear and comprehensive mind, as far as the habits of his profession and his pursuits in life would suffer him to be so. Indeed it is difficult to say, what are the capacities of a man of this character, whose views are cramped and confined by the servility of office; who adjusts the dimensions of his understanding according to the size of the occasion; whose reason is constantly the puppet of his will; whose powers expand in the gleam of popularity, or shrink and shrivel up at the touch of power. There was a natural antipathy

between his mind and lord Chatham's. The one was ardent and impetuous: the other was cool, circumspect, wary, delighting in difficulties and subtlety, proud rather of distrusting its natural feelings and detecting errors in them, than impatient of any thing that thwarted their course, and exerting all its powers to prove them to be right. The manner in which lord Chatham always spoke of Mansfield was the most pointed that could be: Junius did not treat him with more sarcastic bitterness and contempt, Indeed there is a striking coincidence between the opinions and sentiments of that celebrated writer, and those of lord Chatham, in many respects. They had the same political creed and the same personal prejudices. Chatham had not only the same marked dislike to lord Mansfield, but he had evidently the same personal dislike to the king, always directing his censures not so