Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of
general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were distressed in
the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of
things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant
appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger,
which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the
world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the
most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had
brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses of the Company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of
it. America would have furnished that vent, which no other part of the
world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life,
and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East
India Committees have done us at least so much good, as to let us know,
that, without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this
country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India
conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden.
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