Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of general bankruptcy?  Your danger was indeed great.  You were distressed in the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant appellation.  I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger, which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation.  The monopoly of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin.  Such was your representation; such, in some measure, was your case.  The vent of ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses of the Company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of it.  America would have furnished that vent, which no other part of the world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life, and where the demand grows upon the supply.  I hope our dear-bought East India Committees have done us at least so much good, as to let us know, that, without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this country.  It is through the American trade of tea that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden.  They are ponderous indeed; and they must have that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head.  It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of the East.  This folly has thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves.  Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble.  It must be given up.  For on what principle does it stand?  This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,—­a preambulary tax.  It is, indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers or satisfaction to the subject.

Well! but whatever it is, gentlemen will force the colonists to take the teas.  You will force them?  Has seven years’ struggle been yet able to force them?  Oh, but it seems “we are in the right.  The tax is trifling,—­in effect it is rather an exoneration than an imposition; three fourths of the duty formerly payable on teas exported to America is taken off,—­the place of collection is only shifted; instead of the retention of a shilling from the drawback here, it is three-pence custom paid in America.”  All this, Sir, is very true.  But this is the very folly and mischief of the act.  Incredible as it may seem, you know that you have deliberately thrown away a large duty, which you held secure and quiet in your hands, for the vain hope of getting one three fourths less, through every hazard, through certain litigation, and possibly through war.