things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant
appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger,
which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the
world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the
most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had
brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses of the Company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of
it. America would have furnished that vent, which no other part of the
world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life,
and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East
India Committees have done us at least so much good, as to let us know,
that, without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this
country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India
conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They
are ponderous indeed; and they must have that great country to lean
upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost
you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has
thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving
the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but
yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a
preamble. It must be given up. For on what principle does it stand? This
famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description
of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too
comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,--_a preambulary tax_. It is,
indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a