on the part of the English minister to exert that right. "To temporize
would be to yield, and the authority of the mother country, if now
unsupported, would be relinquished forever." And he avowed his idea of
the policy proper to be pursued to be "to retain the right of taxing
America, but to give it every relief that might be consistent with the
welfare of the mother country." He carried his resolution, though the
minority--which on this occasion was led by Mr. Pownall, who had himself
been Governor of Massachusetts, and who moved an amendment to include
tea in the list of taxes proposed to be repealed--was stronger than
usual.[48] But the concession failed to conciliate a single Colonist; it
had become, as Burke said four years afterward, a matter of feeling,[49]
and the irritation fed on itself, till, in 1773, a fresh act, empowering
the East India Company to export tea to the Colonies direct from their
own warehouses without its being subject to any duty in England--which
Lord North undoubtedly intended as a boon to the Colonists--only
increased the exasperation. The ships which brought the tea to Boston
were boarded and seized by a formidable body of rioters disguised as
native savages, and the tea was thrown into the sea. The intelligence
was received in England with very different feelings by the different
parties in the state. The ministers conceived themselves forced to
assert the dignity of the crown, and proposed bills to inflict severe
punishment on both the City of Boston and the whole Province of
Massachusetts. The Opposition insisted on removing the cause of these
disturbances by a total repeal of the tea-duty. The minister prevailed
by a far larger majority than before, but his success only increased the
exasperation in the Colonies; and it was an evil omen for peace that the
leaders of the resistance began to search the records of the English
Long Parliament "for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the
Puritans of that day."[50] The next year saw fresh attempts to procure
the repeal of the obnoxious tax rejected by the House of Commons; but,