bilee. This was the tax on
tea, which had not been struck off along with the rest, but had been
suffered to remain; not that any great revenue was expected to arise
therefrom, but simply to show that they--the king and parliament--had
not disclaimed or yielded up the right to tax and burden the Colonies
when and how they thought fit and proper. This vexed the American
people sorely; for though the bulk of the nuisance had been taken
away, yet all the odor still remained: or, speaking more plainly, the
right of laying such burdens on themselves, of their own free will,
was still denied them; and this, in fact, was the very thing that made
it so intolerable for them to bear. "Is it," said Washington in a
letter to a friend, "the duty of threepence per pound upon tea that we
object to as burdensome? No; but it is the right to lay this duty upon
ourselves for which we contend."

Therefore, as far as the commodity tea was concerned, the people of
the Colonies still observed the non-importation agreement. From some
of the ports, the ships that had come over from England laden with
this delightful plant were sent back, without being suffered to
discharge their cargoes; in others, where it had been landed, it was
not allowed to be sold, but was stowed away in cellars and the like
out-of-the-way places, where it moulded, or became the food of rats
and mice, whose bowels, if we may trust the testimony of some of our
great-grandmothers, were so bound up thereby, that a terrible
mortality set in among them, that swept them away by cart-loads.

Now, the East-India Company, to whom had been granted the sole
privilege of trading in tea for the space of a hundred years, if I
remember rightly, were greatly alarmed at the consequences of the
tea-tax. Enormous quantities of the article had begun to accumulate in
their London warehouses, now that there was no market for it in
America, which hitherto had fed the purse in their left-hand pocket,
as did that in Great Britain the larger one in their right-hand
pocket. "Something must be done," said they to themselves (they
certainly said it to nobody else),--"something must be done, or these
high-spirited women of America will drink their wishy-washy sassafras
till their blood be no thicker than whey, and the purse in our
left-hand pocket become as light and lean and lank as when we sent our
first ship-load thither years ago." This "something to be done" was a
loud petition to parliament, pr