Three courses were open to the ministers.  The first was to enforce the Stamp Act by the sword.  This was the course on which the King, and Grenville, whom the King hated beyond all living men, were alike bent.  The natures of both were arbitrary and stubborn.  They resembled each other so much that they could never be friends; but they resembled each other also so much that they saw almost all important practical questions in the same point of view.  Neither of them would bear to be governed by the other; but they were perfectly agreed as to the best way of governing the people.

Another course was that which Pitt recommended.  He held that the British Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing the colonies.  He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a document of no more validity than Charles’s writ of ship-money, or James’s proclamation dispensing with the penal laws.  This doctrine seems to us, we must own, to be altogether untenable.

Between these extreme courses lay a third way.  The opinion of the most judicious and temperate statesmen of those times was that the British constitution had set no limit whatever to the legislative power of the British King, Lords, and Commons, over the whole British Empire.  Parliament, they held, was legally competent to tax America, as Parliament was legally competent to commit any other act of folly or wickedness, to confiscate the property of all the merchants in Lombard Street, or to attaint any man in the kingdom of high treason, without examining witnesses against him, or hearing him in his own defence.  The most atrocious act of confiscation or of attainder is just as valid an act as the Toleration Act or the Habeas Corpus Act.  But from acts of confiscation and acts of attainder lawgivers are bound, by every obligation of morality, systematically to refrain.  In the same manner ought the British legislature to refrain from taxing the American colonies.  The Stamp Act was indefensible, not because it was beyond the constitutional competence of Parliament, but because it was unjust and impolitic, sterile of revenue, and fertile of discontents.  These sound doctrines were adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues, and were, during a long course of years, inculcated by Burke, in orations, some of which will last as long as the English language.

The winter came; the Parliament met; and the state of the colonies instantly became the subject of fierce contention.  Pitt, whose health had been somewhat restored by the waters of Bath, reappeared in the House of Commons, and, with ardent and pathetic eloquence, not only condemned the Stamp Act, but applauded the resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia, and vehemently maintained, in defiance, we must say, of all reason and of all authority, that, according to the British constitution, the supreme legislative power does not include the power to tax.  The language of Grenville, on the other hand, was such as Strafford might have used at the council-table of Charles the First, when news came of the resistance to the liturgy at Edinburgh.  The colonists were traitors; those who excused them were little better.  Frigates, mortars, bayonets, sabres, were the proper remedies for such distempers.