“Let him,” said he, heatedly. “And much good it will do him. The people are aroused; they have stood as much of this kind of thing as they are going to. It must stop, sir! It must stop!”
“But,” protested the mild-looking man, “suppose it does not stop?”
“In that event, sir, we will carry it further. These colonies wore not settled for the purpose of bringing gain to British merchants and revenue to the treasury at London. No, sir! They were settled that the settlers might be free to conduct their own affairs as they saw best.”
“But the king, the parliament, the ministry——” began the peaked man, but the other stopped him with a snort.
“The king,” said the red-faced man, “is a stubborn, ignorant old meddler; the parliament, with the exception of Pitt and a few others, are a parcel of incompetents, and the ministry might well change places with the clerks to the advantage of the empire!”
Warming up to his subject, and keeping his stick beating a tattoo upon the red brick pavement, the speaker went on:
“Look at the governors they send us, sir! What imbeciles! They’ve tried to take away the charters of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and my own colony of Connecticut. They talk of establishing a peerage in America with lords and earls and dukes, as grand as you please. Our officers and men wrested the country from the French, but they are held in contempt by the British. An English captain outranks an American colonel. Our workmen are forbidden to make the nails that go into the shoes of their horses; iron manufacturing is declared a common nuisance; a hatter in one colony is forbidden to sell his hats in another, and is permitted to have only two apprentices.”
“It is a difficult thing to bear these restrictions upon the country’s natural trade,” said the mild-looking man, his long face growing more solemn. “But if the matter were placed properly before the king, perhaps he would see things in a different light.”
“He will never see them in any light but the one in which he now sees them,” declared the red-faced man, positively. “The British tradesmen have the government under their thumbs; they fear the competition of America and seek to make it dependent upon them for everything. Did they not drive Pitt out of office because he was disposed to do us something like justice?
“Then there were their writs of assistance, as they called them,” proceeded the speaker, seeing that the peaked man was not disposed to answer. “Any ruffian in the British service could break into a man’s house and ransack it from roof to cellar; and we were not supposed to object. And even this was not enough. They must needs saddle us with the Stamp Act. No deed of sale or any other legal paper could be made out unless drawn upon stamped paper that cost anywhere from threepence to six pounds. Then they clapped the tea tax upon us and sent an army into Boston because it was resisted.”