trade but what was prohibited by act of Parliament. I was above giving an answer to anonymous calumnies; but in this place it becomes me to wipe off the aspersion."

To this harangue Mr. Pitt replied:

"I have been charged with giving birth to sedition in America. They have spoken their sentiments with freedom against this unhappy act, and that freedom has become their crime. Sorry am I to hear the liberty of speech in this House imputed as a crime. But the imputation shall not discourage me. It is a liberty I mean to exercise. No gentleman ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which the gentleman who calumniates it might and ought to have profited. He ought to have desisted from his project. The gentleman tells us America is obstinate; America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. If its millions of inhabitants had submitted, taxes would soon have been laid on Ireland; and if ever this nation should have a tyrant for its king, six millions of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.

.

"Why did the gentleman confine himself to Chester and Durham? He might have taken a higher example in Wales that was never taxed by Parliament till it was incorporated.

"The gentleman tells us of many who are taxed, and are not represented, the India Company, merchants, stockholders, manufacturers. Surely, many of these are represented in other capacities. It is a misfortune that more are not actually represented. But they are all inhabitants, and as such are virtually represented. Many have it in their option to be actually represented. They have connection with those that elect, and they have influence over them.

"The gentleman boasts of his bounties to America. Are those bounties intended finally for the benefit of this kingdom? If they are, where is his peculiar merit to America? If they are not, he has misapplied the national treasures.

"If the gentleman can not understand the difference between internal and external taxes, I can not help it. But there is a plain distinction between taxes levied for the purposes of raising revenue, and duties imposed for the regulation of trade for the accommodation of the subject, although in the consequences some revenue may accidentally arise from the latter.

"The gentleman asks when were the Colonies emancipated? I desire to know when they were made slaves? But I do not dwell upon words. 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 threescore years ago, are at three thousand pounds at present. 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 peppercorn into the exchequer to the loss of millions to the nation?

"A great deal has been said without doors 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. If any idea of renouncing allegiance has existed, it was but a momentary frenzy; and if the case was either probable or possible, I should think of the Atlantic sea as less than a line dividing one country from another. The will of Parliament, properly signified, must forever keep the Colonies dependent upon the sovereign kingdom of Great Britain."

But still England claimed the right which America denied, and the repeal of the "Stamp Act" only removed the great contest at arms a little farther into the future. The dragon's teeth had been sown. The task of crushing America to atoms was certainly before England; and even Mr. Pitt would come to realize how far from the truth his words were on this point also. Edmund Burke and other friends rose up in England to plead the cause of the American Colonies, but the spirit of independence could not be allayed. Sophistry on one side was met by defiance and sophistry on the other. Humble and honeyed appeals to the British Crown were soulless. It was folly to talk of the people of these Colonies ever being slaves to Britain. They never had been; and every act of the king and Parliament only led them to the conviction

that the time had come when they could not even be humble subjects of a Government which had ceased to be beneficial to them.

The last section of the "Stamp Act" provides that all revenues to be raised from it were to be held for the benefit of the Colonies, a provision which took much of the poison out of the measure itself, if it did not rob the Revolutionary fire of the stubborn Americans of its genuine heat. Some of the arguments in the mouths of the American leaders, and even those of their English apologizers, now appear somewhat in the light of exaggerations, saying the least of them.

These, however, shrink into small proportions by the side of the grand features of the mighty struggle; and any lurking question about the well founded "Stamp Act," or the perfect justness of the Colonies aiding both by direct and indirect taxation in the support of the British Government, of the powers of Parliament or the rights of the Colonies and of their socalled sufferings and hardships, may well be eternally lost in contemplating the splendor, vastness, and beneficence of its results to the human family.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS.

ARLY in 1765, New York, through her colonial

corresponding committee, proposed the propriety of a general convention or congress. And in June of that year, acting upon this suggestion, the Massachusetts Legislature sent out this letter addressed to the Speaker of each colonial assembly:

"SIR,-The House of Representatives of this Province, in the present session of the general court, have unanimously agreed to propose a meeting, as soon as may be, of committees from the Houses of Representatives or Burgesses, of the several British Colonies on this continent, to consult together on the present circumstances of the Colonies, and the difficulties to which they are and must be reduced, by the operations of the acts of Parliament, for levying duties and taxes on the Colonies; and to consider of a general and united, dutiful, loyal, and humble, representation of their condition to his majesty and to the Parliament, and to implore relief.

"The House of Representatives of this Province have also voted to propose that such meeting be at the city of New York, in the Province of New York, on the first Tuesday in October next, and have appointed a committee of three of their members to attend that service, with such as the other Houses of Representatives or Burgesses, in the several Colonies, may think fit to appoint to meet them; and the committee of the House of Representatives of this Province, are directed to repair to the said New York, on the first Tuesday in October next, accordingly. If, therefore, your honorable House should agree to this proposal, it would be acceptable that as early notice of it as possible might be transmitted to the Speaker of the House of Representatives of this Province."

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina were represented in this convention. Timothy Ruggles of Massachusetts was chosen chairman, and the business in hand was completed in a session of fourteen days. The apparent result of this meeting was a formal declaration of rights, a petition to the King of England, and memorials to the Houses of Parliament. It was composed of some of the most respectable men in America. South Carolina sent Christopher Gadsden, John Rutledge, and Thomas. Lynch. Delaware was represented by her two ablest men, perhaps, Cæsar Rodney and Thomas McKean; and Robert R. Livingston and John Dickinson were at the head of the delegations from New York and Pennsylvania. This was the first consequential effort at concert and union among the Colonies in their opposition to Great Britain, and although all of them were not represented, they all sustained the action of the

convention.

A similar convention met in Albany, New York, eleven years before, which was really the first colonial assembly, and its declared object was the establishment of some plan of union and co-operation. But the incentives to this project were mainly, at least, confined to the incessant annoyances from the Indians and French. Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England Provinces were represented in this convention. They met early in June, 1754, and after entering into a treaty with the Six Nations, on the 4th of July, actually adopted a plan of union and government for all the Colonies. This remarkable measure was the work of Dr. Franklin, one of the