CHAPTER ble adjustment.

XXXI.

The merchants trading to America were very averse that any occasion should be given to 1774. their debtors for postponing or refusing the payment of their debts, or that actual war should put a final stop to a profitable trade already so seriously threatened by the American Association, compared with which all former non-importation agreements had been limited and inefficient. The English Dissenters were inclined by religious sympathies to favor the colonists. Such frag

1775.

ments of the old Whig party as had not coalesced with the king's friends," headed by the Marquis of Rockingham and the Earl of Chatham, supported by the colonial experience of Pownall and Johnstone, and sustained by the eloquence of Burke, Barre, Dunning, and the youthful Fox, few, but able, maintained with zeal those principles of liberty which had descended to them from the times of the English civil wars, and which the threatened civil war in America seemed now again to arouse to new life.

After a long absence, Chatham reappeared in the Jan. 20. House of Lords, and proposed an address to the king advising the recall of the troops from Boston; but this motion, though supported by Lord Camden, after a warm debate was rejected by a very decisive majority. In the Commons, the papers relating to America were reJan. 26. ferred to a committee of the whole. The petitions for conciliation, which flowed in from all the great trading and manufacturing towns of the kingdom, ought properly to have gone to the same committee; but the ministers procured their reference to another committee for a subsequent day, which the opposition derided as a "committee of oblivion." Among the papers laid before Parliament was the petition from the Continental Congress to the king. Three of the colonial agents, Franklin,

XXXI.

Bollan, and Arthur Lee, to whose care this petition had CHAPTER been intrusted, asked to be heard upen it by counsel at the bar of the House. But their request was refused 1775. on the ground that the Congress was an illegal assembly, and the alleged grievances only pretended.

Still persevering in his schemes for conciliation, Chatham brought forward in the Lords a bill for settling the Feb. 1. troubles in America. It required a full acknowledgment on the part of the colonists of the supremacy and superintending power of Parliament, but provided that no tax should ever be levied except by consent of the colonial Assemblies. It contained, also, a provision for a Congress of the colonies to make the required acknowl edgment, and to vote, at the same time, a free grant to the king of a certain perpetual revenue, to be placed at the disposal of Parliament. Chatham exerted himself on this occasion with renewed and remarkable vigor; but, in spite of all his efforts, after a warm and very pointed debate, his bill was refused the courtesy of lying on the table, and, contrary to the usual course, was rejected by a vote of two to one at the first reading.

Agreeably to the scheme foreshadowed in his speech on the address, Lord North, in the House of Commons, brought in a bill for cutting off the trade of New En- Feb. 3 gland elsewhere than to Great Britain, Ireland, and the Sritish West Indies-intended as an offset to the Amercan Association-and suspending the prosecution from those colonies of the Newfoundland fishery, a principal branch at that time of their trade and industry. An address to the throne, proposed by the ministers, and Fel. 7. carried after great debates, declared that a rebellion already existed in Massachusetts, countenanced and fomented by unlawful combinations in other colonies. Effectual measures were recommended for suppressing

CHAPTER this rebellion; and the support of Parliament was pledged XXXI. to the king in the maintenance of the just authority of

1775. the crown and the nation.

Yet the private sentiments of Lord North were not materially different from the opinions avowed and maintained by Chatham. In urging the use of force against the colonies, he yielded to the exigencies of his position at the head of the ministry rather than to his own sense of justice and sound policy. Not willing to relinquish the idea of conciliation, in the midst of the hot debate on the New England Restraining Bill, the minister astonished the nation, and his own party especially, by himself bringing forward a conciliatory proposition, in substance very little different from that which Chatham had offered, and which the House of Lords had so peremptorily rejected. This motion, less precise and specific than Chatham's, proposed, in vague and general terms, that when the Assembly of any province should offer to make a provision, suitable to its circumstances, for raising a sum of money, disposable by Parliament, for the common defense, and should engage to provide for the support of civil government and the administration of justice within its own limits, and such offers should be approved by the king and Parliament, it would be proper, so long as such provision should continue to be made, to forbear the levy of any duties or taxes within such colony by act of Parlia ment except such as might be required for the regulation of trade, the net produce to be carried to the account of such province. This motion was warmly opposed by the ultra supporters of the authority of the mother country, who complained of it as yielding up the whole matter in controversy. North argued, on the contrary, that it yielded nothing, and pledged the mother country to nothing. He did not expect that it would be generally ac

XXXI.

ceptable in America, but he hoped to use it as a means CHAPTER of dividing the colonies. With these explanations, the motion was carried. An indirect negotiation had mean- 1775. while been attempted with Franklin, through the agency of Lord Howe. But Franklin did not regard the ministerial proposals as likely to be satisfactory, and seeing the pass to which things were coming, he embarked for Marc Pennsylvania.

In opposition to the New England Restraining Bill, testimony was heard as to the extent and importance of the fisheries, and their intimate connection with the trade of the mother country; but all without avail. That bill had hardly passed the Commons when fresh informa- March tion arrived from America of the support so generally given there to the proceedings of the Continental Congress. In consequence of this news, another bill was brought in, extending similar restrictions to all the colonies except New York, North Carolina, and Georgia. The Assemblies of New York and Georgia had declined to adopt the American Association; the ministers were encouraged by Governor Martin to entertain hopes of North Carolina also-a delusion to which the agent of that province contributed, by taking upon himself to keep back a petition from the Assembly, containing, as he alleged, many "strange inaccuracies and reflections on the Parliament and ministry." The merchants interested in the West India trade were heard on their petition against this new restraining bill. They gave in evidence the great and increasing magnitude of the sugar trade; the entire dependence on the North American colonies of those concerned in the sugar cultivation for the indispensable articles of provision and lumber, and the danger of famine were trade with those provinces broken off. A petition from the Assembly of Jamaica, laid before

CHAPTER Parliament, while it confessed the weakness of that col.

XXXI. ony by reason of its great slave population, and its total

1775. inability, therefore, to make any resistance by arms, yet

energetically sustained the claim of rights set up by the North American provinces, and vehemently protested against the "plan almost carried into execution for reducing the colonies into the most abject state of slavery." Petitions for conciliation were presented from the English Quakers, from the British settlers in the province of Quebec, and from numerous manufacturing towns. The friends of the ministry got up also a few counterpetitions for vigorous proceedings against the rebellious colonies.

Burke, as representative of the Rockingham section March 22. of the opposition, brought forward a series of resolutions proposing the abandonment of all attempts at parliamentary taxation, and a return to the old method of raising American supplies by the free grant of the colonial Assemblies. He supported these resolutions in an elaborate speech; but his motion was voted down, as was a similar one, introduced a few days after by David Hartley, on behalf of the Chatham section of the opposition.

Wilkes, whom the ministry had labored so hard to crush, and whom the king regarded as his mortal enemy, had not only been returned a member of the present Parliament to exclude him from which no attempt was made but he was also Lord-mayor of London, in which April 30. capacity he presented to the king a remonstrance from the city authorities, expressing "abhorrence" of the measures in progress for "the oppression of their fellowsubjects in the colonies," and entreating the king, as a first step toward the redress of grievances, to dismiss his present ministry.