a
a proclamation of December 27, 1773, announced that "THE TEA-SHIP being
arrived, every Inhabitant who wishes to preserve the Liberty of America
is desired to meet at the STATE-HOUSE, This Morning, precisely {162} at
TEN O'clock, to advise what is best to be done on this alarming
Crisis." "What was best to be done" proved to be to compel the
tea-ship to return at once with its cargo to England. New York refused
to allow the tea-ship "Nancy" to enter the harbor, and if some tea was
eventually landed under the cannon of a man-of-war, it was only to be
locked up as in Charleston, and to be left to lie unused. The bad news
was received in England with an unreasoning fury by those whose fault
it was, and by those who knew nothing at all about the matter; with a
grave indignation by those who, like Pitt, were as resolute to support
the supremacy of England as to plead for justice to her colonies; with
despair by those who dreamed of an honorable and abiding union between
the two peoples; and with applause by those who admired any protest
against injustice, however vehement and irregular.

It is difficult, in reading the debates on the troubles in America, to
credit the sanity of the majority of the speakers. These advocated a
colonial policy that should only have commended itself to a session of
Bedlamites, and clamored for a treatment of the colonists that might
well have shocked the susceptibilities of a savage. No Virginian
planter could be more disdainful of the rights of his slaves, or more
resentful at any attempt to assert them, than the average member of
Parliament was disdainful of the rights of the American colonists and
resentful at their assertion. The English country gentlemen who
applauded the ministers and who howled at Burke seemed to be absolutely
unconscious that the men of Massachusetts and the men of New York were
not merely like themselves made in the same image, but brethren of
their own race, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, children
of the same stock whose resistance to oppression was recorded at
Runnymede and Worcester, at the Boyne and at Culloden. Even if the
colonists had been the knaves and fools and cowards that the
Parliamentary majority appeared to think them, the action of that
majority was of a kind eminently calculated to lend strength to the
most feeble spirit and courage to the most craven heart. The coarse
{163} contempt, the brutal menace which were the distinguishin