clamation. The monopoly
of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues
had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation--such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of the company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of
it. America would have furnished that vent which no other part of the
world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life
and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East
India Committees have done us at least so much good as to let us know
that without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this
country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India
conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They
are ponderous indeed, and they must have that great country to lean
upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost
you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has
thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving
the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but
yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a
preamble. It must be given up. For on what principles does it stand?
This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a
description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but
too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance--_a preambulary tax_. It is
indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a
tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers
or satisfaction to the subject....

Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America than to see
you go out of the plain high-road of finance, and give up your most
certain revenues and your clearest interests, merely for the sake of
insulting your colonies? No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea
could bear an imposition of threepence. But no commodity will bear
threepence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are
irritated; and two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The
feelings of the colonies were formerly the