the cabinet, being, apparently, the forerunner of that more serious
malady which, before the end of the summer, compelled his long
retirement from public life; and the Opposition took advantage of the
state of disorganization and weakness which his illness caused among his
colleagues, to defeat them on the Budget in the House of Commons, by an
amendment to reduce the land-tax, which caused a deficiency in the
supplies of half a million. This deficiency it, of course, became
necessary to meet by some fresh tax; and Townsend--who, though endowed
with great richness of eloquence, was of an imprudent, not to say rash,
temper, and was possessed of too thorough a confidence in his own
ingenuity and fertility of resource ever to be inclined to take into
consideration any objections to which his schemes might be
liable--proposed to raise a portion of the money which was needed by
taxes on glass, paper, tea, and one or two other articles, to be paid as
import duties in the American Colonies. His colleagues, and especially
the Duke of Grafton himself, the First Lord of the Treasury, and as such
the nominal Prime-minister, having been also, as Secretary of State, a
member of Lord Rockingham's ministry, which had repealed the former
taxes, did not consent to the measure without great and avowed
reluctance; but yielded their own judgment to the strong feeling in its
favor which notoriously existed in the House of Commons.[44] Indeed,
that House passed the clauses imposing these import duties without
hesitation, being, probably, influenced in no small degree by the
evidence given in the preceding year by Dr. Franklin, who, as has been
already seen, had explained that the Colonists drew a distinction
between what he called "internal taxes" and import duties "intended to
regulate commerce," and that to the latter class they were not inclined
to object. And a second consideration was, that these new duties were
accompanied and counterbalanced by a reduction of some other taxes; so
that the ministry contended that the effect of these financial measures,