They
are ponderous indeed; and they must have that great country to lean
upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost
you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has
thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving
the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but
yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a
preamble. It must be given up. For on what principle does it stand? This
famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description
of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too
comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,--_a preambulary tax_. It is,
indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a
tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers
or satisfaction to the subject.
Well! but whatever it is, gentlemen will force the colonists to take the
teas. You will force them? Has seven years' struggle been yet able to
force them? Oh, but it seems "we are in the right. The tax is
trifling,--in effect it is rather an exoneration than an imposition;
three fourths of the duty formerly payable on teas exported to America
is taken off,--the place of collection is only shifted; instead of the
retention of a shilling from the drawback here, it is three-pence custom
paid in America." All this, Sir, is very true. But this is the very
folly and mischief of the act.
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