XXXVIII. CHAP. have imbibed a decided partiality for men of tory principles, in preference to the whigs, who, as the assertors of those national rights by which his family had been called to the throne, had hitherto, since the accession of George the first, with a partiality too strongly marked, been exclusively entrusted with the administration of government. Entering on his reign, however, at a time when Britain was in a career of success, by the councils of the great William Pitt, earl of Chatham, he was enabled to finish with honour the war against France and Spain, yet much less glo riously than he might have concluded it by availing himself of the wisdom of the former ministry. From a system pursued by the favourites, who were said to have formed an interior cabinet, and thence directed the acting ministers, the British empire was in a few years brought to the brink of dissolution. British co- In the seventeenth century several English colonies had been settled on the eastern coasts of the immense peninsula of North-America, as in Virginia in 1610, in New-Hampshire in 1623, in Massachusets bay in 1628, in Connecticut in 1635, South-Carolina in 1669, and Pennsylvania in 1682. These and other colonies, rapidly augmented by emigrations from the British islands and elsewhere, from religious or civil discontents, formed a chain of settlements above a thousand miles in length, containing in the year 1765 near three millions of inhabitants. Governed internally by their several assemblies of elected representatives, in which presided governors nominated by his Britannic Majesty, these dependent states had XXXVIII. had never been taxed otherwise than by their own CHAP. representative bodies, in like manner as Ireland by its own parliament. External taxation, on the system of commercial restrictions, the right of which was not disputed, had been exercised by the parliament of Britain, with respect to her dependencies in America, moderately till after the year 1762, when it was carried to a pitch impolitic and absurd, by destroying a contraband commerce with the Spanish colonies, a commerce which brought much wealth into the American settlements of Britain, and, mediately in course of traffick, into Britain itself. A scheme of internal taxation, by authority of the British parliament, was next adopted, to draw a direct revenue from the American colonies into the British exchequer, and in 1765, an act to enforce the use of stamped paper in these colonies was passed, so ignorantly framed as to be scarcely practicable in countries so circumstanced. But its practicability remained untried, as the Americans denied the right of such taxation; and, combining universally to resist this infringement of their liberties, they destroyed the stamps as soon as landed from Europe, while the merchants entered into solemn engagements to import no more merchandize from Britain till the obnoxious act should have been repealed. Their joy at its repeal; which took place in the following year, was not of long duration, when to introduce taxes by indirect means was discovered to be a determined plan of the British government, in which a great part of the Bri tish XXXVIII. CHAP. tish nation was persuaded to acquiesce, from the foolish hope that their taxes at home would be rendered less burthensonse by a revenue derived from the American settlements. The attempts to establish this revenue, which could never have answered the ostensible purpose, were followed by events which brought an enormous load of additional taxes on the people of Britain. American war. Determined to resist in its birth every measure introductory to taxation by a foreign legislature, which, once admitted, would probably be raised by degrees to a ruinously oppressive magnitude, the Americans combined against the reception of those articles of merchandize on which new taxes were imposed by the British parliament. When in 1770 the duties on imported goods were repealed, except three pence a pound on tea, the minds of the Amecans had been so inflamed by political discussion, haughtiness of their governors, and innovations in the executive part of their government, that they could not otherwise be satisfied than by a total repeal of the several acts of the present reign by which they conceived themselves aggrieved, and which they regarded as the commencement of a plan for the complete extinction of their liberties. In 1773 great quantities of tea were sent from England, consigned to agents in the American ports, to be sold on account of the English East-India company; but an universal opposition was made to the landing of the cargoes, which in consequence were carried back to England, except at Charles-town, 2 where XXXVIII. where the tea was landed, but perished unsold in CHAP. damp cellars; and at Boston, where a party of mob, in the disguise of Mohawk savages, boarded the India ship, and committed the tea to the waves of the ocean. An immoveable determination for coercive measures on the side of the British government, and of resistance on the side of the Americans, brought affairs to a crisis. A civil war commenced openly in 1775; and a congress of deputies from the thirteen united states of North America, which had been convened in 1774 at Philadelphia, published in 1776 a solemn declaration of the independence of these states, which was established by a treaty of peace in six years after. ary transac 1773-1777. By the contests of the British government with Parliamentits dependencies in America were the affairs of Ire-tions. land so strongly influenced, as to give occasion, in the course of a few years, for a revolution, happily bloodless, in her political system. Pressed on one side by increasing indigence, and encouraged on the other by the resistance of the Americans, the nation raised its voice in complaint and remonstrance; while by the force of adverse fortune such changes were effected in the British cabinet, that the complaints of Ireland were heard with temper, and at length redressed to a considerable degree. Notwithstanding the preponderance of ministerial influence in the Irish house of commons, their speaker, in a speech to the lord lieutenant, at the bar of the house of lords at the close of the year 1773, declared" that they conceived the most sanguine hopes, that those VOL. II. restrictions, S XXXVIII.. CHAP. restrictions, which the narrow and short-sighted policy of former times, equally injurious to GreatBritain and the Irish nation, imposed on the commerce and manufactures of this kingdom, would be remitted: that it aggravated the sense of their misfortunes to see the rivals, if not the enemies of Great-Britain, in the undisturbed possession of those advantages to which the Irish thought themselves entitled on every principle of policy and justice: and that it was the expectation of being restored to some, if not to all, of those rights, and that alone, which could justify to the people the conduct of their representatives in laying so many additional burdens upon them, in the course of this session." Notwithstanding this instance of patriotism in the commons they had rejected the proposal of a tax of two shillings in the pound on the estates of absentees, which tax was designed to alleviate the poverty occasioned by the drain of money from Ireland ; and which, on this account, and for the raising of a revenue, was rather countenanced than opposed by administration. In 1775 the British ministry procured some small relaxation of restrictions ou Irish commerce by permitting the exportation of a few articles of manufacture to a trifling amount; by granting bounties for the encouragement, and annulling certain duties on the imported products of a fishery; and by allowing a premium of five shillings a barrel on imported flax-seed. Soon after, in the November of the same year, by a message from the lord-lieutenant, |