cle we should have left taxed for a subject of controversy.

Sir, it is not a pleasant consideration, but nothing in the world can
read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of ministry in
this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal ideas
in the management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the state
looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view.
They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and one
pretence, and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort of
regard to their relations or dependencies. They never had any kind of
system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable
tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into
which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts
and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer
piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage,
when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim.
By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils,
so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so
insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have
shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.

Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of
general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were distressed in
the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of
things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant
appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger,
which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the
world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the
most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had
brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses of the Company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of
it. America would have furnished that vent, which no other part of the
world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life,
and where the demand