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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12)




Sir, they who are friends to the schemes of American revenue say, that
the commercial restraint is full as hard a law for America to live
under. I think so, too. I think it, if uncompensated, to be a condition
of as rigorous servitude as men can be subject to. But America bore it
from the fundamental Act of Navigation until 1764. Why? Because men do
bear the inevitable constitution of their original nature with all its
infirmities. The Act of Navigation attended the colonies from their
infancy, grow with their growth, and strengthened with their strength
They were confirmed in obedience to it even more by usage than by law.
They scarcely had remembered a time when they were not subject to such
restraint. Besides, they were indemnified for it by a pecuniary
compensation. Their monopolist happened to be one of the richest men in
the world. By his immense capital (primarily employed, not for their
benefit, but his own) they were enabled to proceed with their fisheries,
their agriculture, their shipbuilding, (and their trade, too, within the
limits,) in such a manner as got far the start of the slow, languid
operations of unassisted Nature. This capital was a hot-bed to them.
Nothing in the history of mankind is like their progress. For my part, I
never cast an eye on their flourishing commerce, and their cultivated
and commodious life, but they seem to me rather ancient nations grown to
perfection through a long series of fortunate events, and a train of
successful industry, accumulating wealth in many centuries, than the
colonies of yesterday,--than a set of miserable outcasts a few years
ago, not so much sent as thrown out on the bleak and barren shore of a
desolate wilderness three thousand miles from all civilized intercourse.

All this was done by England whilst England pursued trade and forgot
revenue. You not only acquired commerce, but you actually created the
very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the
trade of this kingdom at least fourfold. America had the compensation of
your capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another
compensation, which you are now going to take away from her. She had,
except the commercial restraint, every characteristic mark of a free
people in all her internal concerns. She had the image of the British
Constitution. She had the substance. She was taxed by her own
representatives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid them
all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own internal government.
This whole state of commercial servitude and civil liberty, taken
together, is certainly not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the
ordinary circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a liberal
condition.

I know, Sir, that great and not unsuccessful pains have been taken to
inflame our minds by an outcry, in this House, and out of it, that in
America the Act of Navigation neither is or never was obeyed. But if you
take the colonies through, I affirm that its authority never was
disputed,--that it was nowhere disputed for any length of time,--and, on
the whole, that it was well observed. Wherever the act pressed hard,
many individuals, indeed, evaded it. This is nothing. These scattered
individuals never denied the law, and never obeyed it. Just as it
happens, whenever the laws of trade, whenever the laws of revenue, press
hard upon the people in England: in that case all your shores are full
of contraband. Your right to give a monopoly to the East India Company,
your right to lay immense duties on French brandy, are not disputed in
England. You do not make this charge on any man. But you know that
there is not a creek from Pentland Frith to the Isle of Wight in which
they do not smuggle immense quantities of teas, East India goods, and
brandies. I take it for granted that the authority of Governor Bernard
in this point is indisputable. Speaking of these laws, as they regarded
that part of America now in so unhappy a condition, he says, "I believe
they are nowhere better supported than in this province: I do not
pretend that it is entirely free from a breach of these laws, but that
such a breach, if discovered, is justly punished." What more can you say
of the obedience to any laws in any country? An obedience to these laws
formed the acknowledgment, instituted by yourselves, for your
superiority, and was the payment you originally imposed for your
protection.

Whether you were right or wrong in establishing the colonies on the
principles of commercial monopoly, rather than on that of revenue, is at
this day a problem of mere speculation. You cannot have both by the same
authority. To join together the restraints of an universal internal and
external monopoly with an universal internal and external taxation is an
unnatural union,--perfect, uncompensated slavery. You have long since
decided for yourself and them; and you and they have prospered
exceedingly under that decision.

This nation, Sir, never thought of departing from that choice until the
period immediately on the close of the last war. Then a scheme of
government, new in many things, seemed to have been adopted. I saw, or
thought I saw, several symptoms of a great change, whilst I sat in your
gallery, a good while before I had the honor of a seat in this House.
At that period the necessity was established of keeping up no less than
twenty new regiments, with twenty colonels capable of seats in this
House. This scheme was adopted with very general applause from all
sides, at the very time that, by your conquests in America, your danger
from foreign attempts in that part of the world was much lessened, or
indeed rather quite over. When this huge increase of military
establishment was resolved on, a revenue was to be found to support so
great a burden. Country gentlemen, the great patrons of economy, and the
great resisters of a standing armed force, would not have entered with
much alacrity into the vote for so large and so expensive an army, if
they had been very sure that they were to continue to pay for it. But
hopes of another kind were held out to them; and in particular, I well
remember that Mr. Townshend, in a brilliant harangue on this subject,
did dazzle them by playing before their eyes the image of a revenue to
be raised in America.

Here began to dawn the first glimmerings of this new colony system. It
appeared more distinctly afterwards, when it was devolved upon a person
to whom, on other accounts, this country owes very great obligations. I
do believe that he had a very serious desire to benefit the public. But
with no small study of the detail, he did not seem to have his view, at
least equally, carried to the total circuit of our affairs. He generally
considered his objects in lights that were rather too detached. Whether
the business of an American revenue was imposed upon him
altogether,--whether it was entirely the result of his own speculation,
or, what is more probable, that his own ideas rather coincided with the
instructions he had received,--certain it is, that, with the best
intentions in the world, he first brought this fatal scheme into form,
and established it by Act of Parliament.

No man can believe, that, at this time of day, I mean to lean on the
venerable memory of a great man, whose loss we deplore in common. Our
little party differences have been long ago composed; and I have acted
more with him, and certainly with more pleasure with him, than ever I
acted against him. Undoubtedly Mr. Grenville was a first-rate figure in
this country. With a masculine understanding, and a stout and resolute
heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took public
business, not as a duty which he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was
to enjoy; and he seemed to have no delight out of this House, except in
such things as some way related to the business that was to be done
within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, his ambition
was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself, not by the
low, pimping politics of a court, but to win his way to power through
the laborious gradations of public service, and to secure himself a
well-earned rank in Parliament by a thorough knowledge of its
constitution and a perfect practice in all its business.

Sir, if such a man fell into errors, it must be from defects not
intrinsical; they must be rather sought in the particular habits of his
life, which, though they do not alter the groundwork of character, yet
tinge it with their own hue. He was bred in a profession. He was bred to
the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human
sciences,--a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the
understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it
is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to
liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that
study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into
business,--I mean into the business of office, and the limited and fixed
methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had,
undoubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not
valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in
office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of
office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business
not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted.
These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who
are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in
their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the
waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file
affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind,
and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever
office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better
of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves.
He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing
trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not
quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation
to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. Among regulations, that which
stood first in reputation was his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He
has often professed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily
admit, in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the act
be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed
and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of
circumstances, it must do great mischief, and frequently even defeat its
own purpose.

After the war, and in the last years of it, the trade of America had
increased far beyond the speculations of the most sanguine imaginations.
It swelled out on every side. It filled all its proper channels to the
brim. It overflowed with a rich redundance, and breaking its banks on
the right and on the left, it spread out upon some places where it was
indeed improper, upon others where it was only irregular. It is the
nature of all greatness not to be exact; and great trade will always be
attended with considerable abuses. The contraband will always keep pace
in some measure with the fair trade. It should stand as a fundamental
maxim, that no vulgar precaution ought to be employed in the cure of
evils which are closely connected with the cause of our prosperity.
Perhaps this great person turned his eyes somewhat less than was just
towards the incredible increase of the fair trade, and looked with
something of too exquisite a jealousy towards the contraband. He
certainly felt a singular degree of anxiety on the subject, and even
began to act from that passion earlier than is commonly imagined. For
whilst he was First Lord of the Admiralty, though not strictly called
upon in his official line, he presented a very strong memorial to the
Lords of the Treasury, (my Lord Bute was then at the head of the board,)
heavily complaining of the growth of the illicit commerce in America.
Some mischief happened even at that time from this over-earnest zeal.
Much greater happened afterwards, when it operated with greater power in
the highest department of the finances. The bonds of the Act of
Navigation were straitened so much that America was on the point of
having no trade, either contraband or legitimate. They found, under the
construction and execution then used, the act no longer tying, but
actually strangling them. All this coming with new enumerations of
commodities, with regulations which in a manner put a stop to the mutual
coasting intercourse of the colonies, with the appointment of courts of
admiralty under various improper circumstances, with a sudden extinction
of the paper currencies, with a compulsory provision for the quartering
of soldiers,--the people of America thought themselves proceeded against
as delinquents, or, at best, as people under suspicion of delinquency,
and in such a manner as they imagined their recent services in the war
did not at all merit. Any of these innumerable regulations, perhaps,
would not have alarmed alone; some might be thought reasonable; the
multitude struck them with terror.

But the grand manoeuvre in that business of new regulating the colonies
was the fifteenth act of the fourth of George the Third, which, besides
containing several of the matters to which I have just alluded, opened a
new principle. And here properly began the second period of the policy
of this country with regard to the colonies, by which the scheme of a
regular plantation Parliamentary revenue was adopted in theory and
settled in practice: a revenue not substituted in the place of, but
superadded to, a monopoly; which monopoly was enforced at the same time
with additional strictness, and the execution put into military hands.

This act, Sir, had for the first time the title of "granting duties in
the colonies and plantations of America," and for the first time it was
asserted in the preamble "that it was _just_ and _necessary_ that a
revenue should be raised there"; then came the technical words of
"giving and granting." And thus a complete American revenue act was made
in all the forms, and with a full avowal of the right, equity, policy,
and even necessity, of taxing the colonies, without any formal consent
of theirs. There are contained also in the preamble to that act these
very remarkable words,--the Commons, &c., "being desirous to make _some_
provision in the _present_ session of Parliament _towards_ raising the
said revenue." By these words it appeared to the colonies that this act
was but a beginning of sorrows,--that every session was to produce
something of the same kind,--that we were to go on, from day to day, in
charging them with such taxes as we pleased, for such a military force
as we should think proper. Had this plan been pursued, it was evident
that the provincial assemblies, in which the Americans felt all their
portion of importance, and beheld their sole image of freedom, were
_ipso facto_ annihilated. This ill prospect before them seemed to be
boundless in extent and endless in duration. Sir, they were not
mistaken. The ministry valued themselves when this act passed, and when
they gave notice of the Stamp Act, that both of the duties came very
short of their ideas of American taxation. Great was the applause of
this measure here. In England we cried out for new taxes on America,
whilst they cried out that they were nearly crushed with those which
the war and their own grants had brought upon them.

Sir, it has been said in the debate, that, when the first American
revenue act (the act in 1764, imposing the port-duties) passed, the
Americans did not object to the principle. It is true they touched it
but very tenderly. It was not a direct attack. They were, it is true, as
yet novices,--as yet unaccustomed to direct attacks upon any of the
rights of Parliament. The duties were port-duties, like those they had
been accustomed to bear,--with this difference, that the title was not
the same, the preamble not the same, and the spirit altogether unlike.
But of what service is this observation to the cause of those that make
it? It is a full refutation of the pretence for their present cruelty to
America; for it shows, out of their own mouths, that our colonies were
backward to enter into the present vexatious and ruinous controversy.

There is also another circulation abroad, (spread with a malignant
intention, which I cannot attribute to those who say the same thing in
this House,) that Mr. Grenville gave the colony agents an option for
their assemblies to tax themselves, which they had refused. I find that
much stress is laid on this, as a fact. However, it happens neither to
be true nor possible. I will observe, first, that Mr. Grenville never
thought fit to make this apology for himself in the innumerable debates
that were had upon the subject. He might have proposed to the colony
agents, that they should agree in some mode of taxation as the ground of
an act of Parliament. But he never could have proposed that they should
tax themselves on requisition, which is, the assertion of the day.
Indeed, Mr. Grenville well knew that the colony agents could have no
general powers to consent to it; and they had no time to consult their
assemblies for particular powers, before he passed his first revenue
act. If you compare dates, you will find it impossible. Burdened as the
agents knew the colonies were at that time, they could not give the
least hope of such grants. His own favorite governor was of opinion that
the Americans were not then taxable objects.

"Nor was the time less favorable to the _equity_ of such a taxation. I
don't mean to dispute the reasonableness of America contributing to the
charges of Great Britain, _when she is able_; nor, I believe, would the
Americans themselves have disputed it at a _proper time and season_. But
it should be considered, that the American governments themselves have,
in the prosecution of the late war, contracted very large debts, which
it will take some years to pay off, and in the mean time occasion very
_burdensome taxes for that purpose_ only. For instance, this government,
which is as much beforehand as any, raises every year 37,500_l._
sterling for sinking their debt, and must continue it for four years
longer at least before it will be clear."

These are the words of Governor Bernard's letter to a member of the old
ministry, and which he has since printed.

Mr. Grenville could not have made this proposition to the agents for
another reason. He was of opinion, which he has declared in this House
an hundred times, that the colonies could not legally grant any revenue
to the crown, and that infinite mischiefs would be the consequence of
such a power. When Mr. Grenville had passed the first revenue act, and
in the same session had made this House come to a resolution for laying
a stamp-duty on America, between that time and the passing the Stamp Act
into a law he told a considerable and most respectable merchant, a
member of this House, whom I am truly sorry I do not now see in his
place, when he represented against this proceeding, that, if the
stamp-duty was disliked, he was willing to exchange it for any other
equally productive,--but that, if he objected to the Americans being
taxed by Parliament, he might save himself the trouble of the
discussion, as he was determined on the measure. This is the fact, and,
if you please, I will mention a very unquestionable authority for it.

Thus, Sir, I have disposed of this falsehood. But falsehood has a
perennial spring. It is said that no conjecture could be made of the
dislike of the colonies to the principle. This is as untrue as the
other. After the resolution of the House, and before the passing of the
Stamp Act, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and New York did send
remonstrances objecting to this mode of Parliamentary taxation. What was
the consequence? They were suppressed, they were put under the table,
notwithstanding an order of Council to the contrary, by the ministry
which composed the very Council that had made the order; and thus the
House proceeded to its business of taxing without the least regular
knowledge of the objections which were made to it. But to give that
House its due, it was not over-desirous to receive information or to
hear remonstrance. On the 15th of February, 1765, whilst the Stamp Act
was under deliberation, they refused with scorn even so much as to
receive four petitions presented from so respectable colonies as
Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Carolina, besides one from the
traders of Jamaica. As to the colonies, they had no alternative left to
them but to disobey, or to pay the taxes imposed by that Parliament,
which was not suffered, or did not suffer itself, even to hear them
remonstrate upon the subject.

This was the state of the colonies before his Majesty thought fit to
change his ministers. It stands upon no authority of mine. It is proved
by uncontrovertible records. The honorable gentleman has desired some of
us to lay our hands upon our hearts and answer to his queries upon the
historical part of this consideration, and by his manner (as well as my
eyes could discern it) he seemed to address himself to me.

Sir, I will answer him as clearly as I am able, and with great openness:
I have nothing to conceal. In the year sixty-five, being in a very
private station, far enough from any line of business, and not having
the honor of a seat in this House, it was my fortune, unknowing and
unknown to the then ministry, by the intervention of a common friend, to
become connected with a very noble person, and at the head of the
Treasury Department. It was, indeed, in a situation of little rank and
no consequence, suitable to the mediocrity of my talents and
pretensions,--but a situation near enough to enable me to see, as well
as others, what was going on; and I did see in that noble person such
sound principles, such an enlargement of mind, such clear and sagacious
sense, and such unshaken fortitude, as have bound me, as well as others
much better than me, by an inviolable attachment to him from that time
forward. Sir, Lord Rockingham very early in that summer received a
strong representation from many weighty English merchants and
manufacturers, from governors of provinces and commanders of men-of-war,
against almost the whole of the American commercial regulations,--and
particularly with regard to the total ruin which was threatened to the
Spanish trade. I believe, Sir, the noble lord soon saw his way in this
business. But he did not rashly determine against acts which it might be
supposed were the result of much deliberation. However, Sir, he scarcely
began to open the ground, when the whole veteran body of office took the
alarm. A violent outcry of all (except those who knew and felt the
mischief) was raised against any alteration. On one hand, his attempt
was a direct violation of treaties and public law; on the other, the Act
of Navigation and all the corps of trade-laws were drawn up in array
against it.

The first step the noble lord took was, to have the opinion of his
excellent, learned, and ever-lamented friend, the late Mr. Yorke, then
Attorney-General, on the point of law. When he knew that formally and
officially which in substance he had known before, he immediately
dispatched orders to redress the grievance. But I will say it for the
then minister, he is of that constitution of mind, that I know he would
have issued, on the same critical occasion, the very same orders, if the
acts of trade had been, as they were not, directly against him, and
would have cheerfully submitted to the equity of Parliament for his
indemnity.

On the conclusion of this business of the Spanish trade, the news of the
troubles on account of the Stamp Act arrived in England. It was not
until the end of October that these accounts were received. No sooner
had the sound of that mighty tempest reached us in England, than the
whole of the then opposition, instead of feeling humbled by the unhappy
issue of their measures, seemed to be infinitely elated, and cried out,
that the ministry, from envy to the glory of their predecessors, were
prepared to repeal the Stamp Act. Near nine years after, the honorable
gentleman takes quite opposite ground, and now challenges me to put my
hand to my heart and say whether the ministry had resolved on the repeal
till a considerable time after the meeting of Parliament. Though I do
not very well know what the honorable gentleman wishes to infer from the
admission or from the denial of this fact on which he so earnestly
adjures me, I do put my hand on my heart and assure him that they did
_not_ come to a resolution directly to repeal. They weighed this matter
as its difficulty and importance required. They considered maturely
among themselves. They consulted with all who could give advice or
information. It was not determined until a little before the meeting of
Parliament; but it was determined, and the main lines of their own plan
marked out, before that meeting. Two questions arose. (I hope I am not
going into a narrative troublesome to the House.)

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