If all the Colonies do not appear at the outcry, what is the condition of those assemblies who offer, by themselves or their agents, to tax themselves up to your ideas of their proportion?  The refractory Colonies who refuse all composition will remain taxed only to your old impositions, which, however grievous in principle, are trifling as to production.  The obedient Colonies in this scheme are heavily taxed, the refractory remain unburdened.  What will you do?  Will you lay new and heavier taxes by Parliament on the disobedient?  Pray consider in what way you can do it.  You are perfectly convinced that, in the way of taxing, you can do nothing but at the ports.  Now suppose it is Virginia that refuses to appear at your auction, while Maryland and North Carolina bid handsomely for their ransom, and are taxed to your quota, how will you put these Colonies on a par?  Will you tax the tobacco of Virginia?  If you do, you give its death-wound to your English revenue at home, and to one of the very greatest articles of your own foreign trade.  If you tax the import of that rebellious Colony, what do you tax but your own manufactures, or the goods of some other obedient and already well-taxed Colony?  Who has said one word on this labyrinth of detail, which bewilders you more and more as you enter into it?  Who has presented, who can present you with a clue to lead you out of it?  I think, Sir, it is impossible that you should not recollect that the Colony bounds are so implicated in one another,—­you know it by your other experiments in the bill for prohibiting the New England fishery,—­that you can lay no possible restraints on almost any of them which may not be presently eluded, if you do not confound the innocent with the guilty, and burthen those whom, upon every principle, you ought to exonerate.  He must be grossly ignorant of America who thinks that, without falling into this confusion of all rules of equity and policy, you can restrain any single Colony, especially Virginia and Maryland, the central and most important of them all.

Let it also be considered that, either in the present confusion you settle a permanent contingent, which will and must be trifling, and then you have no effectual revenue; or you change the quota at every exigency, and then on every new repartition you will have a new quarrel.

Reflect, besides, that when you have fixed a quota for every Colony, you have not provided for prompt and punctual payment.  Suppose one, two, five, ten years’ arrears.  You cannot issue a Treasury Extent against the failing Colony.  You must make new Boston Port Bills, new restraining laws, new acts for dragging men to England for trial.  You must send out new fleets, new armies.  All is to begin again.  From this day forward the Empire is never to know an hour’s tranquillity.  An intestine fire will be kept alive in the bowels of the Colonies, which one time or other must consume this whole Empire.  I allow indeed that the empire of Germany raises her revenue and her troops by quotas and contingents; but the revenue of the empire, and the army of the empire, is the worst revenue and the worst army in the world.