Secondly, it is an experiment which must be fatal in the end to our Constitution.  For what is it but a scheme for taxing the colonies in the antechamber of the noble lord and his successors?  To settle the quotas and proportions in this House is clearly impossible.  You, Sir, may flatter yourself you shall sit a state auctioneer, with your hammer in your hand, and knock down to each colony as it bids.  But to settle (on the plan laid down by the noble lord) the true proportional payment for four or five and twenty governments, according to the absolute and the relative wealth of each, and according to the British proportion of wealth and burden, is a wild and chimerical notion.  This new taxation must therefore come in by the back-door of the Constitution.  Each quota must be brought to this House ready formed.  You can neither add nor alter.  You must register it.  You can do nothing further.  For on what grounds can you deliberate either before or after the proposition?  You cannot hear the counsel for all these provinces, quarrelling each on its own quantity of payment, and its proportion to others.  If you should attempt it, the Committee of Provincial Ways and Means, or by whatever other name it will delight to be called, must swallow up all the time of Parliament.

Thirdly, it does not give satisfaction to the complaint of the colonies.  They complain that they are taxed without their consent.  You answer, that you will fix the sum at which they shall be taxed.  That is, you give them the very grievance for the remedy.  You tell them, indeed, that you will leave the mode to themselves.  I really beg pardon; it gives me pain to mention it; but you must be sensible that you will not perform this part of the compact.  For suppose the colonies were to lay the duties which furnished their contingent upon the importation of your manufactures; you know you would never suffer such a tax to be laid.  You know, too, that you would not suffer many other modes of taxation.  So that, when you come to explain yourself, it will be found that you will neither leave to themselves the quantum nor the mode, nor indeed anything.  The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.

Fourthly, this method of ransom by auction, unless it be universally accepted, will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties.  In what year of our Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled?  To say nothing of the impossibility that colony agents should have general powers of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore you, that the communication by special messages and orders between these agents and their constituents on each variation of the case, when the parties come to contend together, and to dispute on their relative proportions, will be a matter of delay, perplexity, and confusion, that never can have an end.