fore also, though indirectly, to the revenue of the mother-country, while the moment that the general legislative power of Parliament was admitted it was impossible to deny that it was no greater tyranny to enact that "deeds and contracts should be void unless written on stamped paper"[1] than it would have been to interfere with the personal liberty of the colonists by some arbitrary law.
The Imperial power in legislative matters was as loudly asserted in theory by Pitt and Shelburne as by Rockingham and Burke, but the former placed an important limitation on its operation. It was a limitation which fitted the circumstances of the time. The Ministry practically admitted its justice when they repealed the Stamp Act. On the other hand the gradual development of the colonies, even if the War of Independence had never taken place, would have forced on Pitt and Shelburne an extension of the cases exempted from the general legislative power of Parliament. External taxation would have had to follow internal taxation, and the general legislative power would have had to sink into abeyance. The right of the English Commons to grant taxes was recognised before their right to intervene in legislation and foreign policy; and the Whig statesmen and American patriots, who in 1765 were slow to ask for more than the recognition of the distinction between a commercial and a fiscal tax, only acted in the spirit of the great founders of English liberty in the seventeenth century, who "required twelve years of repeated aggression, before they learned that, to render the existence of monarchy compatible with freedom, they must not only strip it of all it had usurped, but of something that was its own."[2]
Such was the first beginning of the great schism of the Whig party, which from that time forward divided it into a less liberal and a more liberal branch. It lasted till after a brief reconciliation, in 1782, the two branches fell apart; and in the time of the French Revolution the
