by any man, either in America, which this letter is meant to soothe, or in England, which it is meant to deceive.  It was impossible it should:  because every man, in the least acquainted with the detail of commerce, must know that several of the articles on which the tax was repealed were fitter objects of duties than almost any other articles that could possibly be chosen,—­without comparison more so than the tea that was left taxed, as infinitely less liable to be eluded by contraband.  The tax upon red and white lead was of this nature.  You have in this kingdom an advantage in lead that amounts to a monopoly.  When you find yourself in this situation of advantage, you sometimes venture to tax even your own export.  You did so soon after the last war, when, upon this principle, you ventured to impose a duty on coals.  In all the articles of American contraband trade, who ever heard of the smuggling of red lead and white lead?  You might, therefore, well enough, without danger of contraband, and without injury to commerce, (if this were the whole consideration,) have taxed these commodities.  The same may be said of glass.  Besides, some of the things taxed were so trivial, that the loss of the objects themselves, and their utter annihilation out of American commerce, would have been comparatively as nothing.  But is the article of tea such an object in the trade of England, as not to be felt, or felt but slightly, like white lead, and red lead, and painters’ colors?  Tea is an object of far other importance.  Tea is perhaps the most important object, taking it with its necessary connections, of any in the mighty circle of our commerce.  If commercial principles had been the true motives to the repeal, or had they been at all attended to, tea would have been the last article we should have left taxed for a subject of controversy.

Sir, it is not a pleasant consideration, but nothing in the world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of ministry in this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal ideas in the management of great affairs.  Never have the servants of the state looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view.  They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and one pretence, and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort of regard to their relations or dependencies.  They never had any kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.  And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim.  By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.