Hence arose this unfortunate act, the subject of this day's debate: from
a disposition which, after making an American revenue to please one,
repealed it to please others, and again revived it in hopes of pleasing
a third, and of catching something in the ideas of all.

This revenue act of 1767 formed the fourth period of American policy.
How we have fared since then: what woful variety of schemes have been
adopted; what enforcing, and what repealing; what bullying, and what
submitting; what doing, and undoing; what straining, and what relaxing;
what assemblies dissolved for not obeying, and called again without
obedience; what troops sent out to quell resistance, and, on meeting
that resistance, recalled; what shiftings, and changes, and jumblings of
all kinds of men at home, which left no possibility of order,
consistency, vigor, or even so much as a decent unity of color, in
anyone public measure--It is a tedious, irksome task. My duty may call
me to open it out some other time; on a former occasion[12] I tried your
temper on a part of it; for the present I shall forbear.

After all these changes and agitations, your immediate situation upon
the question on your paper is at length brought to this. You have an act
of Parliament stating that "it is _expedient_ to raise a revenue in
America." By a partial repeal you annihilated the greatest part of that
revenue which this preamble declares to be so expedient. You have
substituted no other in the place of it. A Secretary of State has
disclaimed, in the king's name, all thoughts of such a substitution in
future. The principle of this disclaimer goes to what has been left, as
well as what has been repealed. The tax which lingers after its
companions (under a preamble declaring an American revenue expedient,
and for the sole purpose of supporting the theory of that preamble)
militates with the assurance authentically conveyed to the colonies, and