by Edward Cline
“And, no doubt, many of these same said colonials will pay with their own skins, too. However, if the reports of officers in His Majesty’s service in the colonies in the past are to be warranted—and I don’t for a minute doubt the substance of their complaints or the truth of their anecdotes—not many colonial skins will be cut by French bayonet or bruised by Indian war club. The colonials, it is commonly said, are uniformly lazy, undisciplined, contentious, quarrelsome, niggardly, presumptuous, and cowardly, amongst themselves as well as amongst our brave officers and troops! It is thought by many in high and middling places that if the colonial auxiliaries under General Braddock’s command had been more forthright and daring with their musketry in that fatal wood near the Ohio, that brave and enterprising officer would be sitting in this very chamber today to receive our thanks, and not buried in some ignominious patch of mud in the wilderness. But—the colonial temperament is a matter of record. Our colonials! Scullions all, the sons of convicts, whores, and malcontents! From the greedy gentry of the northern parts, to the posturing macaronis of the southern, every man Jack of them unmindful of the fact that he is a colonial, a mere plant nurtured in exotic soil for the benefit of this nation! Oh! How ungrateful, our Britannic flora!
“Yes! Ungrateful, their noggins emboldened by a few leagues of water! Now, it is thought here in this hall, and in London, and in all of England, and even in Wales and Scotland, that His Majesty’s government—we here, within these ancient walls, and they across the way, in Lords are the corporate lawgiver and defender of our excellent constitution. Why, the most ignoble knife-grinder and blasphemous fishwife would be able to tell you that! Yet, proposals for new laws, or for the repeal of old ones, or for changes in existing statutes from colonial legislatures—those self-important congresses of coggers, costermongers, and cork farmers—arrive by the bulging barrelful on nearly every merchant vessel that drops anchor at Custom House. These proposals are dutifully conveyed by liveried but sweaty porters to the Privy Council and the Board of Trade, to the Admiralty and the Surveyor-General and the Commissioner of Customs.
“I am not friend to many members of those august bodies, but they truly have my sympathies, for they have the thankless task of sorting through those mountains of malign missives to segregate the specious from the serious. Many of these pleadings and addresses are shot through with a constant harping on the rights of the colonials as Englishmen, and so on with that kind of blather, like a one-tune hurdy-gurdy, a tiresome thing to endure, as many of you can attest. Virginia and Massachusetts are particularly monotonous and noisome in this respect. The planters would like to sell their weed directly to Spain or Holland, without the benefit of our lawful brokerage, while the Boston felt factors wish to fashion their own hats for sale there—or here!—without the material ever crossing the sea to be knocked together by our own artists. Well, sirs! We must needs remind our distant brethren that we are busy bees, too, and that the rights of Englishmen are only as good as the laws we enact allow—here, as well as there!
“Gentlemen, must I ask these questions? Does the beadle instruct the university? Does the postilion choose his employer’s destination? Does the bailiff counsel the magistrate? No! Should the colonials be permitted to advise us of our business? No! This is a custom unwisely indulged and which must be corrected! They must be reminded as civilly but as strenuously as possible that they are residents of that far land at this nation’s leisure, pleasure, expense, and tolerance! This nation’s, and His Majesty’s! They wish us to respect their rights. Well, and why not? We would not deny them those rights. But, if they wish a greater role in the public affairs of this empire, let them repatriate themselves to this fair island, and queue up at the polling places—here!—where they may exercise those native rights on the soil from which they and those rights have sprung!
“Yes! For that is the nub of the matter! Here they will find no special circumstances, no calculated abridgement of their rights! There in New York, and in Boston, in Philadelphia, and Williamsburg, and Charleston, they find themselves in special circumstances that necessitate abridgement, and like it not! But—they elect to be there, and not here! And if they cannot purchase this simple reasoning, if they persist in pelting us with petitions, memorials, and remonstrances, I say it must be the time to forget civility, and chastise the colonials as good parents would wisely chastise wayward and misbehaved children!”
Pannell is interrupted at this point by another member of the House who questions what relevance his ranting has to the question of how to finance the new war with France.
“You are so right, sir! Will the House please forgive me my enthusiasm, my passion, and my misfired patriotism? I leave the floor so that the debate on the particulars of finance may continue.”
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SPEECHES FOR AND AGAINST THE STAMP ACT PARLIAMENT, FEBRUARY 1765
Colonel Isaac Barré, member for Chipping Wycombe, replied with indignation to another member’s speech about the ingratitude of the colonials.
“They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America! They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country…They nourished by your indulgence? They grew up by your neglect of them! And as soon as you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over them, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon them, men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them!…They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defense, have exerted a valor amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defense of a country whose frontier and interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument…Remember I this day told you so, that spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still…However superior to me in general knowledge and experience the reputable body of this House may be, yet I claim to know more of America than most of you, having seen and been conversant in that country. The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated…”
Sir Dogmael Jones, member for Swansditch and an ally of Hugh Kenrick, also speaks against Prime Minister George Grenville’s proposed Stamp Act. He rises after Colonel Barré.
“I commend my valued colleague, the member for Chipping Wycombe, for his brave and heart-felt words. They will be remembered, when my own and others’ are not.
“The maxim with which the honorable minister [Grenville] concluded his address may have been appropriate and enough for our ancestors, in a distant time when kings were true kings, barons true barons, commoners the dross and drudge of the realm, and when all were ignorant of a larger canvas of things. In point of fact, that maxim applied exclusively to kings and barons; commoners were never a party to its formulation, limited as they were by law and custom to merely support and obedience, a lesson harshly taught them on numerous occasions.
“But much progress has been made since those ancient and brutal times, and things seen but dimly then are clearly perceived in these. It is neither appropriate nor enough for us to pursue a policy or pass an act founded on that maxim; to attempt it would be a call for a return to dullness and ignorance. After all, the man whose genius ended our dependency on that maxim was Mr. John Locke, and I very much doubt that any of us here today could credibly dispute him in the most carefully prepared disquisition. And while this nation may have so corrupted and compromised his clarity on the issue of rights versus power—or perhaps even repudiated it—we all here today should be mindful that the colonials—those ‘sons of liberty,’ as they were just now so trenchantly knighted by my esteemed colleague—the colonials take Mr. Locke very seriously. The conflict which the honorable minister labored at the beginning to deny exists, is not so much a political one, as a philosophic one, and I feel it my duty to inform the honorable minister and his party that Nature is, and will contin
ue to be, on the side of the Americans.
“Nature will rise up and either overturn a corrupt system, or abandon it in a vindication of natural right.
“I had planned, on the opportunity to speak, to review the honorable minister’s record as evidence of his hostility to British liberty, by citing, among so many instances, his purchase of the Isle of Man in order to extinguish the smuggling trade there—a trade born and sustained under the aegis of taxation—his efforts to more efficiently collect land and salt taxes, his frustrated attempts to conquer Jersey and Guernsey, and most especially his campaign against publishers and printers in this very metropolis who evade the same stamp tax.
“But his address was evidence enough of that hostility. The purpose of his proposed tax, he says, is to help defray the costs of maintaining an army in North America and a navy in its waters. Consequently, that part of the Crown budget would be reserved for its usual outlays. The budget, of course, rests on revenues, and those are derived from taxes. And for what purpose are all those taxes laid and collected in an ever-mounting debt? Why, to sustain an overbearing, conceited stratum of placeholders, receivers of pensions, and beneficiaries of perpetual gratuities. It is for their sake that these laws and taxes are enacted and enforced—and subsequently flouted and evaded. So much money is diverted to sustain so much nothing, when it could go to increasing the tangible prosperity of this nation under the shield of genuine liberty, which I hasten to stress is not to be confused with the shallow, corrupted, mockish husk of it that we boast of now. We should blush in contrition when we are complimented by men abroad, and even compliment ourselves, for that vaunted liberty.
“The establishment of the sustained and the entitled do not object to prosperity, and they have a mean, grudging regard for liberty, so long as the prosperity guarantees their causeless incomes, so long as liberty does not impinge upon or threaten to deprive them of their lucre. I ask this question, not queried by the honorable minister: Can we expect the colonials to grow in prosperity under the insidious burden he proposes to lay upon them, and can the obdurate stratum of the idle expect to profit from their certain poverty?
“I ask this House—or that half of it who deign to attend today—not to rush to oblige the honorable minister until they have devoted some hard thought to this tax. I invite the proponents of these resolutions to set aside some time to ponder the contradictions inherent in their policies, actions, and desires. I likewise invite my colleagues in opposition to consider the folly of their concessions to the honorable minister’s principal arguments. If his administration derives any strength at all on this matter, it comes not from his party, but from the fatal confusion of the well-meaning of our party, one not dissimilar from that of a thirsty, shipwrecked man who, out of desperation, drinks sea water for want of a purer, uncontaminated elixir.
“I end here with my own warning, sirs. I do not expect the Americans—for let us refer to the colonials as Americans, and not mistake them, as the honorable minister will not, for Englishmen—I do not expect them to submit to this tax except at the prodding of a bayonet or legislative extortion, and, perhaps, not even then. If you contrive to humble them, you should not expect that they shall long remain in the thralldom of humility, for perhaps we are all mistaken, and they are not Englishmen at all, but the inhabitants of another kingdom.
“Colonel Barré is correct when he warns that the Americans will not surrender their birthright—and I refer to that expounded by Mr. Locke—for a mess of pottage, no matter how much you dulcify the bowl with bounties, rate reductions, and similar bribes for them to remain on their knees. I am confident they will tire of the business and assert their full freedom.
“In conclusion, I am grateful that a man of subtler persuasion is not at the helm of this matter, for that man may at least depend on the esteem in which the Americans hold him, and thus be able to persuade them to concede and capitulate. But we all know that he would possess the wisdom not to pursue the folly.”
Sir Henoch Pannell, now a political enemy of Dogmael Jones, rises in answer to Barré and Jones:
“I had not planned to speak today, sirs, but late, offensive words make it my duty to. I commend the honorable minister on so clear a presentation of his bill. I will say at the beginning that I may be relied upon to support his resolutions now before this committee to be discussed, and any amendments to them in future, for such are surely to occur in this contentious House. And, I oppose Sir William’s motion to postpone a vote on the resolutions. They are a simple, uncomplex matter to be simply disposed of.
“I will say further that the honorable minister’s scheme is an ingenious one that will relieve this nation of some of the expense of victory, by obliging our colonies to contribute their equitable—and, may I say, tardy—share of that expense, for, as the honorable minister so aptly pointed out, the greatest part of that expense went to the preservation of those colonies, and of their liberties. In brief, I concur with every reason and sentiment offered by the honorable minister that this should be so—but for one or two trifling ones.
“The honorable minister contends that if the colonials were not subject to this proposed tax, ‘they are not entitled to the privileges of Englishmen.’ With all modesty, and with the greatest deference to his experience, and only seeming to agree with the member for Swansditch, may I point out to the House an error in cogitation here? I say that the colonials have never been Englishmen, for they have never been burdened by the proposed tax, which, it is a matter of common knowledge, is simply an extension of the one we pay there, and have paid since the time of Charles the Second. That fact constitutes an onerous kind of privilege. And, on that point, I will carry the honorable minister’s assertion one step further, and contend that if they wish to be Englishmen, let the colonials submit to this and other taxes, and praise this body and His Majesty for the opportunity. It is they who have been negligently privileged all these decades. It is time for them to earn the glorious appellation of Englishmen.
“Allow me, patient sirs, to point out not so much as another error in the honorable minister’s assumptions, as an oversight. As I do not regard the colonials—and I mean those on the continent, I do not include our West Indian colleagues here today—as I do not regard those persons as true Englishmen, I say that the colonies ought not to be represented in this House, and for two reasons.
“The first is that historians of my acquaintance record that the colonies of ancient Greece and Rome were not represented in the legislatures of their capitals. They were administered, not represented! At times wisely, at other times, not so. That is beside the point. I do not believe that any colonial has been so foolish as to request representation, nor do I believe that the honorable minister has seriously contemplated the notion even in the abstract. Still, the question to ask is: Why should we make precedent and depart from that policy?
“The second reason I must broach at the risk of confounding my first. I wish to offer my shoulder with others in the sad but necessary duty of pallbearer in the funeral of the colonial complaint of taxation without representation in this House. The colonies are represented—as the honorable minister explained—even though their populations are not even counted among the one-tenth or one-twentieth of the enfranchised populace of this nation who are directly represented. That is the way the Constitution and custom have arranged matters, and that is that. Now, we hear no similar complaints of non-representation from those towns and regions of this isle that do not send members here. That is because those people know they are represented, in spirit, in the abstract, in kind—virtually, as that oft-heard word describes their situation. And, they submit with happiness to Parliament’s authority.
“The colonies, however, exist by grace of the Crown and His Majesty and for the benefit of this nation, and I have always questioned the folly of allowing them the leave to determine expenditures and their own methods of allocation and collection. The colonies have of late been especially hard-mouthed over the reins of sup
ervision from this House and the Board of Trade. They have not been properly lunged, sirs, and they will never be ridden unless a commanding hand takes them under training.
“I believe I made a speech on this vexatious colonial matter some time ago—why, at the beginning of the late war! I believe I warned this House, then sitting in a Committee of Supply, that this colonial pestering and posturing over the twin mooncalves of taxation and representation would not abate, would not cease until Parliament scolded its children and banished all discussion of the matter. My remarks were dismissed then, not without good cause, for I had, in the heat of my concerns, digressed from the business then before the committee. I will not belabor the points I made then, but only repeat that if these colonials wish to be represented, let them come here and take up residence, so that they may be properly represented! Some of them have done so. There is Mr. Huske, born and reared in New Hampshire. And there is Mr. Abercromby, who, although born here, spent so much time in the southern plantations, that he acquired a unique but not unpleasant pattern of speech. Now, they are not only represented—they represent!