I dare say the noble lord is perfectly well read, because the duty of his particular office requires he should be so, in all our revenue laws, and in the policy which is to be collected out of them.  Now, Sir, when he had read this act of American revenue, and a little recovered from his astonishment, I suppose he made one step retrograde (it is but one) and looked at the act which stands just before in the statute-book.  The American revenue act is the forty-fifth chapter; the other to which I refer is the forty-fourth of the same session.  These two acts are both to the same purpose:  both revenue acts; both taxing out of the kingdom; and both taxing British manufactures exported.  As the forty-fifth is an act for raising a revenue in America, the forty-fourth is an act for raising a revenue in the Isle of Man.  The two acts perfectly agree in all respects, except one.  In the act for taxing the Isle of Man the noble lord will find, not, as in the American act, four or fire articles, but almost the whole body of British manufactures, taxed from two and a half to fifteen per cent, and some articles, such as that of spirits, a great deal higher.  You did not think it uncommercial to tax the whole mass of your manufactures, and, let me add, your agriculture too; for, I now recollect, British corn is there also taxed up to ten per cent, and this too in the very head-quarters, the very citadel of smuggling, the Isle of Man.  Now will the noble lord condescend to tell me why he repealed the taxes on your manufactures sent out to America, and not the taxes on the manufactures exported to the Isle of Man?  The principle was exactly the same, the objects charged infinitely more extensive, the duties without comparison higher.  Why?  Why, notwithstanding all his childish pretexts, because the taxes were quietly submitted to in the Isle of Man, and because they raised a flame in America.  Your reasons were political, not commercial.  The repeal was made, as Lord Hillsborough’s letter well expresses it, to regain “the confidence and affection of the colonies, on which the glory and safety of the British empire depend.”  A wise and just motive, surely, if ever there was such.  But the mischief and dishonor is, that you have not done what you had given the colonies just cause to expect, when your ministers disclaimed the idea of taxes for a revenue.  There is nothing simple, nothing manly, nothing ingenuous, open, decisive, or steady, in the proceeding, with regard either to the continuance or the repeal of the taxes.  The whole has an air of littleness and fraud.  The article of tea is slurred over in the circular letter, as it were by accident:  nothing is said of a resolution either to keep that tax or to give it up.  There is no fair dealing in any part of the transaction.

If you mean to follow your true motive and your public faith, give up your tax on tea for raising a revenue, the principle of which has, in effect, been disclaimed in your name, and which produces you no advantage,—­no, not a penny.  Or, if you choose to go on with a poor pretence instead of a solid reason, and will still adhere to your cant of commerce, you have ten thousand times more strong commercial reasons for giving up this duty on tea than for abandoning the five others that you have already renounced.