Sir, this vermin of court reporters, when they are forced into day upon one point, are sure to burrow in another:  but they shall have no refuge; I will make them bolt out of all their holes.  Conscious that they must be baffled, when they attribute a precedent disturbance to a subsequent measure, they take other ground, almost as absurd, but very common in modern practice, and very wicked; which is, to attribute the ill effect of ill-judged conduct to the arguments which had been used to dissuade us from it.  They say, that the opposition made in Parliament to the Stamp Act, at the time of its passing, encouraged the Americans to their resistance.  This has even formally appeared in print in a regular volume from an advocate of that faction,—­a Dr. Tucker.  This Dr. Tucker is already a dean, and his earnest labors in this vineyard will, I suppose, raise him to a bishopric.  But this assertion, too, just like the rest, is false.  In all the papers which have loaded your table, in all the vast crowd of verbal witnesses that appeared at your bar, witnesses which were indiscriminately produced from both sides of the House, not the least hint of such a cause of disturbance has ever appeared.  As to the fact of a strenuous opposition to the Stamp Act, I sat as a stranger in your gallery when the act was under consideration.  Far from anything inflammatory, I never heard a more languid debate in this House.  No more than two or three gentlemen, as I remember, spoke against the act, and that with great reserve and remarkable temper.  There was but one division in the whole progress of the bill; and the minority did not reach to more than 39 or 40.  In the House of Lords I do not recollect that there was any debate or division at all.  I am sure there was no protest.  In fact, the affair passed with so very, very little noise, that in town they scarcely knew the nature of what you were doing.  The opposition to the bill in England never could have done this mischief, because there scarcely ever was less of opposition to a bill of consequence.

Sir, the agents and distributors of falsehoods have, with their usual industry, circulated another lie, of the same nature with the former.  It is this:  that the disturbances arose from the account which had been received in America of the change in the ministry.  No longer awed, it seems, with the spirit of the former rulers, they thought themselves a match for what our calumniators choose to qualify by the name of so feeble a ministry as succeeded.  Feeble in one sense these men certainly may be called:  for, with all their efforts, and they have made many, they have not been able to resist the distempered vigor and insane alacrity with which you are rushing to your ruin.  But it does so happen, that the falsity of this circulation is (like the rest) demonstrated by indisputable dates and records.