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 riots, such as those of Boston, and even in the Assemblies of some of the States by language scarcely short of treason,[37] seemed a concession to intimidation scarcely compatible with the maintenance of the dignity of the crown or the legitimate authority of Parliament.  On the other hand, to persist in the retention of a tax which the whole population affected by it was evidently determined to resist to the uttermost, was to incur the still greater danger of rebellion and civil war.  In this dilemma, the ministers resolved on a course calculated, as they conceived, to avoid both evils, by combining a satisfaction of the complaints of the Colonists with an assertion of the absolute supremacy of the British crown and Parliament for every purpose.  And on February 24, 1766, the Secretary of State brought in a bill which, after declaring, in its first clause, “that the King’s Majesty, by and with the consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the Colonists and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever,” proceeded to repeal the Stamp Act, giving a strong proof of the sincerity of the desire to conciliate the Colonists by the unusual step of fixing the second reading of the bill for the next day.