d into greater lengths than I
intended. It is enough to say, that before the ministers of 1765 had
determined to propose the repeal of the Stamp Act in Parliament, they
had the whole of the American constitution and commerce very fully
before them. They considered maturely; they decided with wisdom: let me
add, with firmness. For they resolved, as a preliminary to that repeal,
to assert in the fullest and least equivocal terms the unlimited
legislative right of this country over its colonies; and, having done
this, to propose the repeal, on principles, not of constitutional right,
but on those of expediency, of equity, of lenity, and of the true
interests present and future of that great object for which alone the
colonies were founded, navigation and commerce. This plan I say,
required an uncommon degree of firmness, when we consider that some of
those persons who might be of the greatest use in promoting the repeal,
violently withstood the declaratory act; and they who agreed with
administration in the principles of that law, equally made, as well the
reasons on which the declaratory act itself stood, as those on which it
was opposed, grounds for an opposition to the repeal.

If the then ministry resolved first to declare the right, it was not
from any opinion they entertained of its future use in regular
taxation. Their opinions were full and declared against the ordinary use
of such a power. But it was plain, that the general reasonings which
were employed against that power went directly to our whole legislative
right; and one part of it could not be yielded to such arguments,
without a virtual surrender of all the rest. Besides, if that very
specific power of levying money in the colonies were not retained as a
sacred trust in the hands of Great Britain (to be used, not in the first
instance for supply, but in the last exigence for control), it is
obvious, that the presiding authority of Great Britain, as the head, the
arbiter, and director of the whole empire, would vanish into an empty
name, without operation or energy. With the habitual exercise of such a
power in the ordinary course of supply, no trace of freedom could remain
to America.[91] If Great Britain were stripped of this right, every
principle of unity and subordination in the empire was gone forever.
Whether all this can be reconciled in legal speculation, is a matter of
no consequence. It is reconciled in policy: and politics ought to be
adjusted, n