er the proposition? You
cannot hear the counsel for all these provinces, quarrelling each on its
own quantity of payment, and its proportion to others. If you should
attempt it, the Committee of Provincial Ways and Means, or by whatever
other name it will delight to be called, must swallow up all the time of
Parliament.

Thirdly, it does not give satisfaction to the complaint of the colonies.
They complain that they are taxed without their consent. You answer,
that you will fix the sum at which they shall be taxed. That is, you
give them the very grievance for the remedy. You tell them, indeed,
that you will leave the mode to themselves. I really beg pardon; it
gives me pain to mention it; but you must be sensible that you will not
perform this part of the compact. For suppose the colonies were to lay
the duties which furnished their contingent upon the importation of your
manufactures; you know you would never suffer such a tax to be laid. You
know, too, that you would not suffer many other modes of taxation. So
that, when you come to explain yourself, it will be found that you will
neither leave to themselves the quantum nor the mode, nor indeed
anything. The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.

Fourthly, this method of ransom by auction, unless it be _universally_
accepted, will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties. In
what year of our Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled? To
say nothing of the impossibility that colony agents should have general
powers of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore
you, that the communication by special messages and orders between these
agents and their constituents on each variation of the case, when the
parties come to contend together, and to dispute on their relative
proportions, will be a matter of delay, perplexity, and confusion, that
never can have an end.

If all the colonies do not appear at the outcry, what is the condition
of those assemblies who offer, by themselves or their agents, to tax
themselves up to your ideas of their proportion? The refractory
colonies, who refuse all composition, will remain taxed only to your old
impositions, which, however grievous in principle, are trifling as to
production. The obedient colonies in this scheme are heavily taxed; the
refractory remain unburdened. What will you do? Will you lay new and
heavier taxes by Parliament on the disobedient? Pray consider in what
way you can