Lastly, That it is the indispensable duty of these colonies to the best of sovereigns, to the mother country, and to themselves, to endeavor, by a loyal and dutiful address to his majesty, and humble application to both houses of parliament, to procure the repeal of the act for granting and applying certain stamp duties, of all clauses of any other acts of parliament, whereby the jurisdiction of the admiralty is extended as aforesaid, and of the other late acts for the restriction of the American commerce.
H[ezekiah] Niles, editor, The Weekly Register, July 25, 1812 (Baltimore), II, 340-341.
142. An Englishman s Protest against Taxation
BY WILLIAM PITT, LATER EARL OF CHATHAM
For Pitt, see No. 128 above. His speech represents the strong opposition to putting a pressure on the colonies, and shows how far the whole question involved the relative rights of the crown and Parliament in England. — Bibliography : Mahon, England, V, 129-140; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, VI, 74.
GENTLEMEN, Sir (to the Speaker), 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 I am 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 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. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest. I come not here armed at all points, with law cases and acts of Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog's-ears, to defend the cause of liberty : if I had, I myself would have cited the two cases of Chester and Durham. I would have cited them, to have shewn that, even under former arbitrary reigns, Parliaments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent, and allowed them
