own nature
enforce itself, nothing but a _very_ considerable military force can do
it."

It is remarkable, Sir, that the persons who formerly trumpeted forth the
most loudly the violent resolutions of assemblies, the universal
insurrections, the seizing and burning the stamped papers, the forcing
stamp officers to resign their commissions under the gallows, the
rifling and pulling down of the houses of magistrates, and the expulsion
from their country of all who dared to write or speak a single word in
defence of the powers of Parliament,--these very trumpeters are now the
men that represent the whole as a mere trifle, and choose to date all
the disturbances from the repeal of the Stamp Act, which put an end to
them. Hear your officers abroad, and let them refute this shameless
falsehood, who, in all their correspondence, state the disturbances as
owing to their true causes, the discontent of the people from the taxes.
You have this evidence in your own archives; and it will give you
complete satisfaction, if you are not so far lost to all Parliamentary
ideas of information as rather to credit the lie of the day than the
records of your own House.

Sir, this vermin of court reporters, when they are forced into day upon
one point, are sure to burrow in another: but they shall have no refuge;
I will make them bolt out of all their holes. Conscious that they must
be baffled, when they attribute a precedent disturbance to a subsequent
measure, they take other ground, almost as absurd, but very common in
modern practice, and very wicked; which is, to attribute the ill effect
of ill-judged conduct to the arguments which had been used to dissuade
us from it. They say, that the opposition made in Parliament to the
Stamp Act, at the time of its passing, encouraged the Americans to their
resistance. This has even formally appeared in print in a regular volume
from an advocate of that faction,--a Dr. Tucker. This Dr. Tucker is
already a dean, and his earnest labors in this vineyard will, I suppose,
raise him to a bishopric. But this assertion, too, just like the rest,
is false. In all the papers which have loaded your table, in all the
vast crowd of verbal witnesses that appeared at your bar, witnesses
which were indiscriminately produced from both sides of the House, not
the least hint of such a cause of disturbance has ever appeared. As to
the fact of a strenuous opposition to the Stamp Act, I sat as a stranger
in your gallery