What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the Minister—his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected—was of another order from his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand. America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies, and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts—first as ever in her protest—marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost." The distinction was accepted by the assembly of every colony; and it was with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were many who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that, boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin could give no assurance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation, and without such an assurance Grenville had no mind to change his plans. In February 1765 the Stamp Act was passed through both Houses with less opposition than a turnpike bill.
At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was hardly passed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, by the exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons, nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. His refusal to join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to the main body of the Whigs.
The Rockingham Ministry.
The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid, and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the great Whig nobles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765 was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the Colonies, and it was probably through this difference of sentiment that Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from America which made this attitude impossible. Vigorously as he had struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the Colonies, when they were passed, but that of submission. But submission was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper; and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its assembly was the first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts. Massachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia.
Pitt and America.
The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its assembly reached England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated. In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition, and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen, co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker of the day.
Edmund Burke.
At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory—its passionate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order, and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch so complicated a machine."
Burke and politics.
Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might come from particular or from special reforms.
