not the redress of a grievance, but the extinction of a right which was an essential part of “the controlling supremacy of England.”  The fact that the right to tax had been denied made it a positive duty on the part of the English minister to exert that right.  “To temporize would be to yield, and the authority of the mother country, if now unsupported, would be relinquished forever.”  And he avowed his idea of the policy proper to be pursued to be “to retain the right of taxing America, but to give it every relief that might be consistent with the welfare of the mother country.”  He carried his resolution, though the minority—­which on this occasion was led by Mr. Pownall, who had himself been Governor of Massachusetts, and who moved an amendment to include tea in the list of taxes proposed to be repealed—­was stronger than usual.[48] But the concession failed to conciliate a single Colonist; it had become, as Burke said four years afterward, a matter of feeling,[49] and the irritation fed on itself, till, in 1773, a fresh act, empowering the East India Company to export tea to the Colonies direct from their own warehouses without its being subject to any duty in England—­which Lord North undoubtedly intended as a boon to the Colonists—­only increased the exasperation.  The ships which brought the tea to Boston were boarded and seized by a formidable body of rioters disguised as native savages, and the tea was thrown into the sea.  The intelligence was received in England with very different feelings by the different parties in the state.  The ministers conceived themselves forced to assert the dignity of the crown, and proposed bills to inflict severe punishment on both the City of Boston and the whole Province of Massachusetts.  The Opposition insisted on removing the cause of these disturbances by a total repeal of the tea-duty.  The minister prevailed by a far larger majority than before, but his success only increased the exasperation in the Colonies; and it was an evil omen for peace that the leaders of the resistance began to search the records of the English Long Parliament “for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of that day."[50] The next year saw fresh attempts to procure the repeal of the obnoxious tax rejected by the House of Commons; but, before the news of this division reached America, blood had already been shed.[51] Civil war began.  The next year the Colonies, now united in one solid body, asserted their Independence, taking the title of the United States; and, though the government at home made more than one effort to recall the Colonists to their allegiance, and sent out commissioners of high rank, with large powers of concession; and though in one remarkable instance the mission of Mr. Penn, in the summer of 1775, with the petition to the King known as “the Olive Branch,” seemed to show a desire for a maintenance of the union on the part of the Colonial Congress,[52] from the moment that the sword was drawn all hope of preserving the connection of the Colonies must have been seen by all reasonable men to be at an end.