Here was certainly a disturbance preceding the repeal,—­such a disturbance as Mr. Grenville thought necessary to qualify by the name of an insurrection, and the epithet of a rebellious force:  terms much stronger than any by which those who then supported his motion have ever since thought proper to distinguish the subsequent disturbances in America.  They were disturbances which seemed to him and his friends to justify as strong a promise of support as hath been usual to give in the beginning of a war with the most powerful and declared enemies.  When the accounts of the American governors came before the House, they appeared stronger even than the warmth of public imagination had painted them:  so much stronger, that the papers on your table bear me out in saying that all the late disturbances, which have been at one time the minister’s motives for the repeal of five out of six of the new court taxes, and are now his pretences for refusing to repeal that sixth, did not amount—­why do I compare them?—­no, not to a tenth part of the tumults and violence which prevailed long before the repeal of that act.

Ministry cannot refuse the authority of the commander-in-chief, General Gage, who, in his letter of the 4th of November, from New York, thus represents the state of things:—­

“It is difficult to say, from the highest to the lowest, who has not been accessory to this insurrection, either by writing, or mutual agreements to oppose the act, by what they are pleased to term all legal opposition to it.  Nothing effectual has been proposed, either to prevent or quell the tumult. The rest of the provinces are in the same situation, as to a positive refusal to take the stamps, and threatening those who shall take them to plunder and murder them; and this affair stands in all the provinces, that, unless the act from its own nature enforce itself, nothing but a very considerable military force can do it.”

It is remarkable, Sir, that the persons who formerly trumpeted forth the most loudly the violent resolutions of assemblies, the universal insurrections, the seizing and burning the stamped papers, the forcing stamp officers to resign their commissions under the gallows, the rifling and pulling down of the houses of magistrates, and the expulsion from their country of all who dared to write or speak a single word in defence of the powers of Parliament,—­these very trumpeters are now the men that represent the whole as a mere trifle, and choose to date all the disturbances from the repeal of the Stamp Act, which put an end to them.  Hear your officers abroad, and let them refute this shameless falsehood, who, in all their correspondence, state the disturbances as owing to their true causes, the discontent of the people from the taxes.  You have this evidence in your own archives; and it will give you complete satisfaction, if you are not so far lost to all Parliamentary ideas of information as rather to credit the lie of the day than the records of your own House.