This act, Sir, had for the first time the title of “granting duties in the colonies and plantations of America,” and for the first time it was asserted in the preamble “that it was just and necessary that a revenue should be raised there”; then came the technical words of “giving and granting.”  And thus a complete American revenue act was made in all the forms, and with a full avowal of the right, equity, policy, and even necessity, of taxing the colonies, without any formal consent of theirs.  There are contained also in the preamble to that act these very remarkable words,—­the Commons, &c., “being desirous to make some provision in the present session of Parliament towards raising the said revenue.”  By these words it appeared to the colonies that this act was but a beginning of sorrows,—­that every session was to produce something of the same kind,—­that we were to go on, from day to day, in charging them with such taxes as we pleased, for such a military force as we should think proper.  Had this plan been pursued, it was evident that the provincial assemblies, in which the Americans felt all their portion of importance, and beheld their sole image of freedom, were ipso facto annihilated.  This ill prospect before them seemed to be boundless in extent and endless in duration.  Sir, they were not mistaken.  The ministry valued themselves when this act passed, and when they gave notice of the Stamp Act, that both of the duties came very short of their ideas of American taxation.  Great was the applause of this measure here.  In England we cried out for new taxes on America, whilst they cried out that they were nearly crushed with those which the war and their own grants had brought upon them.

Sir, it has been said in the debate, that, when the first American revenue act (the act in 1764, imposing the port-duties) passed, the Americans did not object to the principle.  It is true they touched it but very tenderly.  It was not a direct attack.  They were, it is true, as yet novices,—­as yet unaccustomed to direct attacks upon any of the rights of Parliament.  The duties were port-duties, like those they had been accustomed to bear,—­with this difference, that the title was not the same, the preamble not the same, and the spirit altogether unlike.  But of what service is this observation to the cause of those that make it?  It is a full refutation of the pretence for their present cruelty to America; for it shows, out of their own mouths, that our colonies were backward to enter into the present vexatious and ruinous controversy.