do it. You are perfectly convinced, that, in the way of
taxing, you can do nothing but at the ports. Now suppose it is Virginia
that refuses to appear at your auction, while Maryland and North
Carolina bid handsomely for their ransom, and are taxed to your quota,
how will you put these colonies on a par? Will you tax the tobacco of
Virginia? If you do, you give its death-wound to your English revenue at
home, and to one of the very greatest articles of your own foreign
trade. If you tax the import of that rebellious colony, what do you tax
but your own manufactures, or the goods of some other obedient and
already well-taxed colony? Who has said one word on this labyrinth of
detail, which bewilders you more and more as you enter into it? Who has
presented, who can present, you with a clew to lead you out of it? I
think, Sir, it is impossible that you should not recollect that the
colony bounds are so implicated in one another (you know it by your
other experiments in the bill for prohibiting the New England fishery)
that you can lay no possible restraints on almost any of them which may
not be presently eluded, if you do not confound the innocent with the
guilty, and burden those whom upon every principle you ought to
exonerate. He must be grossly ignorant of America, who thinks, that,
without falling into this confusion of all rules of equity and policy,
you can restrain any single colony, especially Virginia and Maryland,
the central, and most important of them all.

Let it also be considered, that either in the present confusion you
settle a permanent contingent, which will and must be trifling, and
then you have no effectual revenue,--or you change the quota at every
exigency, and then on every new repartition you will have a new quarrel.

Reflect besides, that, when you have fixed a quota for every colony, you
have not provided for prompt and punctual payment. Suppose one, two,
five, ten years' arrears. You cannot issue a Treasury extent against the
failing colony. You must make new Boston port bills, new restraining
laws, new acts for dragging men to England for trial. You must send out
new fleets, new armies. All is to begin again. From this day forward the
empire is never to know an hour's tranquillity. An intestine fire will
be kept alive in the bowels of the colonies, which one time or other
must consume this whole empire. I allow, indeed, that the Empire of
Germany raises her revenue and her troops by quotas a