acquainted with Franklin, and won a deep insight into
American affairs. Of the six duties imposed by Townshend's Revenue Act
(1767) five had been repealed, the tea duty alone remained. December 18,
1773, the cargo of an East Indian tea-ship was thrown into the sea at
Boston, and the first armed conflict ensued. Court and government were
resolved to put down this rebellion; Burke, on the contrary, supported
in his great speech "On American Taxation" Rose-Fuller's motion (April,
1774) for suppressing the last duty. England had no right to tax the
colonies, nor had she ever pretended to do so before Grenville's Stamp
Act; that, as well as the most important duties of the Revenue Act, had
been repealed; the tea-duty was slight and it produced short of nothing,
the cost of collection devouring it to the bone; for the Americans
refused to buy imported tea, and they were right to do so; having
inherited English principles they resisted for the same reason for which
Hampden had resisted the payment of the trifling ship-money, because the
principle on which it was demanded would have made him a slave. It would
be a signal folly to maintain the shadow of a duty and to risk the loss
of an empire merely because the preamble of the Revenue Act said it was
expedient that a revenue should be raised in his majesty's dominions in
America.

[Illustration: Burke, Johnson and their friends.]

The blindness of the majority turned away from those wise counsels.
Parliament was dissolved. Burke, elected for Bristol, forthwith
introduced thirteen resolutions, which he defended in his celebrated
speech for "Conciliation with the Colonies" (March 22, 1775). As he had
told his constituents his aim was to reconcile British superiority with
American liberty, he proposed to remove the ground of the difference in
order to restore the former confidence of the colonies in the
mother-country. "Fighting is not the best way of gaining a people of
more than two millions, in which the fierce spirit of liberty is
probably stronger than in any other country, and that liberty is founded
upon English principles." Now, a fundamental point of our Constitution
is that the people have power of "granting their own money;" the
colonial assemblies have uncontested competence to raise taxes, and have
frequently granted them for imperial purposes; sometimes so liberally
that, in 1743, the Commons resolved to reimburse the expense; no method
for procuring a representatio