rom the
people to be taxed. And, in addition to objections on principle, he
urged some that he regarded as of great force as to the working of this
particular tax imposed by the Stamp Act. It was not an equal tax, as the
greater part of the revenue derived from it must arise from lawsuits for
the recovery of debts, and be paid by the lower sort of people; it was a
heavy tax on the poor, and a tax on them for being poor. In the back
settlements, where the population was very thin, the inhabitants would
often be unable to get stamps without taking a long journey for the
purpose. The scarcity of specie, too, in the country would cause the
pressure to be felt with great severity, as, in his opinion, there was
not gold and silver enough in the Colonies to pay the stamp-duty for a
single year. In reply to another question, whether the Colonists would
be satisfied with a repeal of the Stamp Act without a formal
renunciation of the abstract right of Parliament to impose it, he
replied that he believed they would be satisfied. He thought the
resolutions of right would give them very little concern, if they were
never attempted to be carried into practice. The Colonies would probably
consider themselves in the same situation in that respect as Ireland.
They knew that the English Parliament claimed the same right with regard
to Ireland, but that it never exercised it; and they might believe that
they would never exercise it in the Colonies any more than in Ireland.
Indeed, they would think that it never could exercise such a right till
representatives from the Colonies should be admitted into Parliament,
and that whenever an occasion arose to make Parliament regard the
taxation of the Colonies as indispensable, representatives would be
ordered.

This last question put to the witness, like several others in the course
of his examination, had been framed with the express purpose of
eliciting an answer to justify the determination on the subject to which
Lord Rockingham and his colleagues had come. It could not be denied that
the government was placed in a situation of extreme difficulty--
difficulty created, in part, by the conduct of the Colonists themselves.
That, as even their most uncompromising advocate, Mr. Pitt, admitted,
had been imprudent and intemperate, though it was the imprudence of men
who "had been driven to madness by injustice." On the one hand, to
repeal an act the opposition to which had been marked by fierce riot