Q. Did he know that there was a clause | provinces, but never met with them during his which specifically subjected the colony to taxa-residence in Pennsylvania. tion by the British legislature? Q. In the opinion of the witness, were the A. He was well apprised that there was Americans now free? such a clause. Q. Were the people of Pennsylvania content with their charter ? A. Perfectly content. Q. Then did they not acquiesce in the right of the British parliament to enforce taxation? A. They acquiesced in a declaration of the right so long as they experienced no inconvenience from the declaration. QUERIES FROM LORD SANDWICH. Q. Had the witness ever heard of an act entitled, "The declaratory act?" A. He had heard of such an act. Q. Did he ever peruse, and was he sufficiently acquainted with the contents of that act? A. He never had perused it. It never had been much discussed whilst he resided in America. A. Did the witness apprehend that the congress acquiesced in an act which maintained the authority of the British parliament in all cases whatsoever? Objected to, and the witness was desired to withdraw; but being called in again, the question was put, and he replied: That, except in the case of TAXATION, he apprehended the Americans would have no objection to acknowledge the sovereignty of Great Britain. Q. Had the witness any knowledge of certain resolutions passed by the county of Suffolk? A. He had not attended to them. Q. Had the witness any knowledge of an answer given by the continental congress, to what had been commonly called lord North's conciliatory motion? A. The witness knew nothing of the proceedings of the congress, they were generally transacted under the seal of secrecy. Q. Was the witness personally acquainted Q. Had the witness ever heard of any persons who had suffered persecutions, for declaring sentiments favorable to the supremacy of the British parliament ? A. They imagined themselves to be so. Q. In case a formidable force should be sent to America, in support of government, did the witness imagine there were many who would openly profess submission to the authority of parliament ? A. The witness apprehended the few who would join on such occasion would be too trivial a number to be of any consequence. Mr. Penn was then ordered to withdraw, and the duke of Richmond, after descanting with singular propriety on the necessity of immediate conciliation, proposed the last petition from the continental congress to the king, as a basis for a plan of accommodation. His grace of Richmond moved, That the preceding paper furnished grounds of conciliation of the unhappy differences at present subsisting between Great Britain and America, and that some mode should be immediately adopted, for the effectuating so desirable a purpose.' This produced a debate supported on both sides with infinite ingenuity. The numbers were: For the motion 27-Proxies 6-33 Against the motion 50-Proxies 36Majority against the motion 52. -86 WILLIAM PITT-EARL OF CHATHAM. HIS CELEBRATED SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE On a motion for an address to his majesty to My lords-After more than six weeks possession of the papers now before you, on a subject so momentous, at a time when the fate of this nation hangs on every hour, the ministry have at length condescended to submit, to the consideration of the house, intelligence from America, with which your lordships and the public have been long and fully acquainted. The measures of last year, my lords, which have produced the present alarming state of America, were founded upon misrepresentation -they were violent, precipitate and vindictive. A. He had heard of such oppressions in other The nation was told, that it was only a faction in Boston, which opposed all lawful govern- | administration practised against them, I desire ment; that an unwarrantable injury had been done to private property, for which the justice of parliament was called upon, to order reparation; that the least appearance of firmness would awe the Americans into submission, and upon only passing the Rubicon we should be fine clade victor. not to be understood to argue for a reciprocity of indulgence between England and America: I contend not for indulgence, but justice, to America; and I shall ever contend that the Americans owe obedience to us, in a limited degree; they owe obedience to our ordinances of trade and navigation; but let the line be skilfully drawn between the objects of those That the people might choose their representatives, under the impression of those misrep-ordinances, and their private, internal proresentations, the parliament was precipitately dissolved. Thus the nation was to be rendered instrumental in executing the vengeance of administration on that injured, unhappy, traduced people. But now, my lords, we find, that instead of suppressing the opposition of the faction at Boston, these measures have spread it over the whole continent. They have united that whole people, by the most indissoluble of all bands intolerable wrongs. The just retribution is an indiscriminate, unmerciful proscription of the innocent with the guilty, unheard and untried. The bloodless victory, is an impotent general, with his dishonored army, trusting solely to the pick-axe and the spade, for security against the just indignation of an injured and insulted people. My lords, I am happy that a relaxation of my infirmities permits me to seize this earliest opportunity of offering my poor advice to save this unhappy country, at this moment tottering to its ruin. But as I have not the honor of access to his majesty, I will endeavor to transmit to him, through the constitutional channel of this house, my ideas on American business, to rescue him from the misadvice of his present ministers. I congratulate your lordships that that business is at last entered upon, by the noble lord's (lord Dartmouth) laying the papers before you. As I suppose your lordships are too well apprised of their contents, I hope I am not premature in submitting to you my present motion (reads the motion). I wish my lords not to lose a day in this urging present crisis: An hour now lost in allaying the ferment in America, may produce years of calamity: but, for my own part, I will not desert for a moment the conduct of this mighty business from the first to the last, unless nailed to my bed by the extremity of sickness; I will give it unremitting attention: I will knock at the door of this sleeping, or confounded ministry, and will rouse them to a sense of their important danger. When I state the importance of the colonies to this country, and the magnitude of danger hanging over this country from the present plan of mis perty: Let the sacredness of their property remain inviolate; let it be taxable only by their own consent, given in their provincial assemblies, else it will cease to be property: As to the metaphysical refinements attempting to show that the Americans are equally free from obedience to commercial restraints, as from taxation for revenue, as being unrepresented here, I pronounce them futile, frivolous and groundless.-Property is, in its nature, single as an atom. It is indivisible, can belong to one only, and cannot be touched but by his own consent. The law that attempts to alter this disposal of it annihilates it. When I urge this measure for recalling the troops from Boston, I urge it on this pressing principle—that it is necessarily preparatory to the restoration of your prosperity. It will then appear that you are disposed to treat amicably and equitably, and to consider, revise and repeal, if it should be found necessary, as I affirm it will, those violent acts and declarations which have disseminated confusion throughout your empire. Resistance to your acts, was as necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave your fellow subjects in America, who feel that tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or by the bodies which compose it, is equally intolerable to British principles. As to the means of enforcing this thraldom, they are found to be as ridiculous and weak in practice, as they were unjust in principle: Indeed I cannot but feel, with the most anxious sensibility, for the situation of general Gage and the troops under his command; thinking him, as I do, a man of humanity and understanding, and entertaining, as I ever shall, the highest respect, the warmest love, for the British troops. Their situation is truly unworthy, pent up, pining in inglorious inactivity. They are an army of impotence. You may call them an army of safety and of guard; but they are in truth an army of impotence and contempt-and to render the folly equal to the disgrace, they are an army of irritation. I do not mean to censure the inactivity of the troops. It is prudent and necessary inaction. But it is a miserable condition, where disgrace is prudence; and where it is necessary to be contemptible. This tameness, however disgraceful, ought not to be blamed, as I am surprised to hear is done by these ministers. The first drop of blood, shed in a civil and unnatural war, would be an immedicabile vulnus. It would entail hatred and contention between the two people, from generation to generation. Woe be to him who sheds the first, the unexpiable drop of blood in an impious war, with a people contending in the great cause of public liberty. I will tell you plainly, my lords, no son of mine nor any one over whom I have influence, shall ever draw his sword upon his fellow subjects. I therefore urge and conjure your lordships immediately to adopt this conciliatory measure. I will pledge myself for its immediately producing conciliatory effects, from its being well timed: But if you delay, till your vain hope of triumphantly dictating the terms shall be accomplished-you delay forever. And, even admitting that this hope, which in truth is desperate, should be accomplished, what will you gain by a victorious imposition of amity? You will be untrusted and unthanked. Adopt then the grace, while you have the opportunity of reconcilement, or at least prepare the way; allay the ferment prevailing in America, by removing the obnoxious hostile corps. Obnoxious and unserviceable; for their merit can be only inaction. "Non dimicare est vincere." Their victory can never be by exertions. Their force would be most disproportionately exerted, against a brave, generous, and united people, with arms in their hands and courage in their hearts; three millions of people, the genuine descendants of a valiant and pious ancestry, driven to these deserts by the narrow maxims of a superstitious tyranny. And is the spirit of tyrannous persecution never to be appeased? Are the brave sons of those brave forefathers to inherit their sufferings, as they have inherited their virtues? Are they to sustain the inflictions of the most oppressive and unexampled severity, beyond the accounts of history or the description of poetry? "Rhadamanthus habet durrissima regna, castigatque auditque." So says the wisest statesman and politician. But the Bostonians have been condemned unheard. The discriminating hand of vengeance has lumped together innocent and guilty; with all the formalities of hostility, has blocked up the town, and reduced to beggary and famine 30,000 inhabitants. But his majesty is advised that the union of America cannot last.-Ministers have more eyes than I, and should have more ears, but from all the information I have been able to procure, I can pronounce it a union solid, permanent and effectual. Ministers may satisfy themselves and delude the public with the reports of what they call commercial bodies in America. They are not commercial. They are your packers and factors; they live upon nothing, for I call commission nothing; I mean the ministerial authority for their American intelligence. The runners of government, who are paid for their intelligence. But these are not the men, nor this the influence to be considered in America, when we estimate the firmness of their union. Even to extend the question, and to take in the really mercantile circle, will be totally inadequate to the consideration. Trade indeed increases the wealth and glory of a country; but its real strength and stamina are to be looked for among the cultivators of the land. In their simplicity of life is founded the simplicity of virtue, the integrity and courage of freedom. Those true genuine sons of the earth are invincible: and they surround and hem in the mercantile bodies; even if those bodies, which supposition I totally disclaim, could be supposed disaffected to the cause of liberty. Of this general spirit existing in the American nation, for so I wish to distinguish the real and genuine Americans from the pseudo traders I have described; of this spirit of independence, animating the nation of America, I have the most authentic information. It is not new among them; it is, and ever has been their established principle, their confirmed persua-, sion; it is their nature and their doctrine. I remember some years ago when the repeal of the stamp act was in agitation, conversing in a friendly confidence with a person of undoubted respect and authenticity on this subject; and he assured me with a certainty which his judgment and opportunity gave him, that these were the prevalent and steady principles of America: That you might destroy their towns, and cut them off from the superfluities, perhaps the conveniencies of life, but that they were prepared to despise your power, and would not lament their loss, whilst they had, what, my lords?—Their woods and liberty. The name of my authority, if I am called upon, will authenticate the opinion irrefragably. If illegal violences have been, as it is said,committed in America, prepare the way, open a door of possibility, for acknowledgment and satisfac tion I contend for, is and must be observed. My lords-This country superintends and controls their trade and navigation; but they tax themselves. And this distinction between external and internal control, is sacred and insurmountable; it is involved in the abstract nature of things. Property is private, individual, absolute. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far as ships can sail, or winds can blow. It is a great and various machine-To regulate the numberless movements of its several parts, and combine them into effect for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power in the empire. But this supreme power has no effect towards internal taxation-for it does not exist in that relation. There is no such thing, no such idea in this constitution, as a supreme power operating upon property. tion. But proceed not to such coercion, such | colonies, and placed at their head, the distincproscription. Cease your indiscriminate inflictions; amerce not thirty thousands, oppress not three millions, for the faults of forty or fifty. Such severity of injustice must forever render incurable the wounds you have given your colonies; you irritate them to unappeasable rancor. What though you march from town to town, and from province to province ?-Though you should be able to force a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit, how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress? To grasp the dominion of 1,800 miles of continent, populous in valor, liberty and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind; and above all, from the whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed, and with success opposed, loans, benevolences, and ship money in England-the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the bill of rights vindicated the English constitution-the same spirit which established the great fundamental and essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject shall be taxed, but by his own consent. If your lordships will turn to the politics of those times, you will see the attempts of the lords to poison this inestimable benefit of the bill, by an insidious proviso. You will see their attempts defeated, in their conference with the commons, by the decisive arguments of the ascertainers and maintainers of our liberty; you will see the thin, inconclusive and fallacious stuff of those enemies to freedom, contrasted with the sound and solid reasoning of sergeant Glanville and the rest, those great and learned men who adorned and enlightened this country, and placed her security on the summit of justice and freedom. And whilst I am on my legs, and thus do justice to the memory of those great men, I must also justify che merit of the living by declaring my firm and fixed opinion, that such a man exists this day [looking towards lord Cambden]; this glorious spirit of whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty, to golden chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights, as men— as freemen. What shall oppose this spirit? aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of at least double the American numbers! Ireland they have to a man. In that country, joined as it is with the cause of the Let this distinction then remain forever ascertained. Taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours. As an American, I would recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation. As an Englishman, by birth and principle, I recognize to the Americans their supreme, unalienable right to their property; a right which they are justified in the defence of, to the extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the whigs on the other side of the Atlantic, and on this. 'Tis liberty to liberty engaged, that they will defend themselves, their families and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied. It is the alliance of God and nature-immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of Heaven! To such united force, what force shall be opposed! What, my lords, a few regiments in America, and 17 or 18,000 men at home! The idea is too ridiculous to take up a moment of your lordships' time-nor can such a national principled union be resisted by the tricks of office or ministerial manœuvres. Laying papers on your table, or counting noses on a division, will not avert or postpone the hour of danger. It must arrive, my lords, unless these fatal acts are done away; it must arrive in all its horrors. And then these boastful ministers, 'spite of all their confidence and all their manœuvres, shall be forced to hide their heads. But it is not repealing this act of parliament, or that act of parliament it is not repealing a piece of parchment that can restore America to your bosom. You must repeal her fears and her resentments, and you may then hope for her love and gratitude. But now insulted with an armed force posted Tuque, prior, etc. VIRGIL. in Boston, irritated with an hostile array before | establishes solid confidence in the foundation her eyes, her concessions, if you could force of affection and gratitude. So thought the them, would be suspicious and insecure. They wisest poet, and perhaps the wisest man in will be, irato animo. They will not be the political sagacity, the friend of Mæcenas, and sound, honorable pactions of freemen; they the eulogist of Augustus. To him the adopted will be the dictates of fear and the extortions son and successor of the first Cæsar, to him of force. But it is more than evident that you the master of the world, he wisely urged this CANNOT force them, principled and united as conduct of prudence and dignity. they are, to your unworthy terms of submission. It is impossible. And when I hear general Gage censured for inactivity, I must retort with indignation on those whose intemperate measures and improvident councils have betrayed him into his present situation. His situation reminds me, my lords, of the answer of a French general in the civil wars of France, Monsieur Turenne, I think. The queen said to him, with some peevishness, I observe that you were of ten very near the prince during the campaign, why did you not take him?—The Mareschal replied with great coolness—J'avois grand peur, que Monsieur le prince ne me pris,—I was very much afraid the prince would take me. When your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America, when you consider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own-for myself I must declare and avow that, in all my reading and observation, and it has been my favorite study-I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master statesmen of the world-that for solidity and reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of different circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress at Philadelphia.—I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude on such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation-must be vain-must be futile.-We shall be forced ultimately to retract, whilst we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent and oppressive acts:-they must be repealed-you will repeal them: I pledge myself for it you will in the end repeal them. I stake my reputation on it: I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed. Avoid then this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace and happiness, for that is your true dignity, to act with prudence and with justice. That you should first concede is obvious from sound and rational policy. Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from the superior power. It reconciles superiority of power with the feelings of men; and Every motive, therefore, of justice and of policy, of dignity and of prudence, urges you to allay the ferment in America, by a removal of your troops from Boston, by a repeal of your acts of parliament, and by demonstration of amicable dispositions toward your colonies. On the other hand, every danger and every hazard, impend to deter you from perseverance in your present ruinous measures. Foreign war hanging over your heads by a slight and brittle thread: France and Spain watching for the maturity of your errors; with a vigilant eye to America and the temper of your colonies, more than to their own concerns, be they what they may. To conclude, my lords, if the ministers thus persevere in misadvising and misleading the king, I will not say that they can alienate his subjects from his crown, but I will affirm that they will make the crown not worth his wearing. I shall not say that the king is betrayed, but I will pronounce that the kingdom is undone. SPEECH OF WILLIAM PITT, EARL CHATHAM, DELIV- In opposition to Lord Suffolk's proposition to My Lords-I am astonished to hear such principles confessed! I am shocked to hear them avowed in this house, or in this country! Principles, equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian! My lords, I did not intend to have encroached again on your attention; but I cannot repress my indignation. I feel myself impelled by every duty. My lords, we are called upon as members of this house, as men, as Christian men, to protest against such notions standing near the throne, polluting the ear of majesty. That God and nature put into our hands!" I know not what ideas that lord may entertain |