is be owing to an obstinate
perseverance in error, or to a religious adherence to what appears to me
truth and reason, it is in your equity to judge.

Sir, Parliament, having an enlarged view of objects, made, during this
interval, more frequent changes in their sentiments and their conduct
than could be justified in a particular person upon the contracted scale
of private information. But though I do not hazard anything approaching
to a censure on the motives of former Parliaments to all those
alterations, one fact is undoubted,--that under them the state of
America has been kept in continual agitation. Everything administered as
remedy to the public complaint, if it did not produce, was at least
followed by, an heightening of the distemper, until, by a variety of
experiments, that important country has been brought into her present
situation,--a situation which I will not miscall, which I dare not name,
which I scarcely know how to comprehend in the terms of any description.

In this posture, Sir, things stood at the beginning of the session.
About that time, a worthy member,[19] of great Parliamentary experience,
who in the year 1766 filled the chair of the American Committee with
much ability, took me aside, and, lamenting the present aspect of our
politics, told me, things were come to such a pass that our former
methods of proceeding in the House would be no longer tolerated,--that
the public tribunal (never too indulgent to a long and unsuccessful
opposition) would now scrutinize our conduct with unusual
severity,--that the very vicissitudes and shiftings of ministerial
measures, instead of convicting their authors of inconstancy and want of
system, would be taken as an occasion of charging us with a
predetermined discontent which nothing could satisfy, whilst we accused
every measure of vigor as cruel and every proposal of lenity as weak and
irresolute. The public, he said, would not have patience to see us play
the game out with our adversaries; we must produce our hand: it would be
expected that those who for many years had been active in such affairs
should show that they had formed some clear and decided idea of the
principles of colony government, and were capable of drawing out
something like a platform of the ground which might be laid for future
and permanent tranquillity.

I felt the truth of what my honorable friend represented; but I felt my
situation, too. His application might have been made with