ch Grenville had sown his successors had now to reap. The
colonies were in a state bordering on rebellion. The stamps were burned.
The revenue officers were tarred and feathered. All traffic between the
discontented provinces and the mother country was interrupted. The
Exchange of London was in dismay. Half the firms of Bristol and
Liverpool were threatened with bankruptcy. In Leeds, Manchester,
Nottingham it was said that three artisans out of every ten had been
turned adrift. Civil war seemed to be at hand; and it could not be
doubted that, if once the British nation were divided against itself,
France and Spain would soon take part in the quarrel.

Three courses were open to the ministers. The first was to enforce the
Stamp Act by the sword. This was the course on which the King and
Grenville, whom the King hated beyond all living men, were alike bent.
The natures of both were arbitrary and stubborn. They resembled each
other so much that they could never be friends; but they resembled each
other also so much that they saw almost all important practical
questions in the same point of view. Neither of them would bear to be
governed by the other; but they were perfectly agreed as to the best way
of governing the people.

Another course was that which Pitt recommended. He held that the British
Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing
the colonies. He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a
document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or
James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems
to us, we must own, to be altogether untenable.

Between these extreme courses lay a third way. The opinion of the most
judicious and temperate statesmen of those times was that the British
constitution had set no limit whatever to the legislative power of the
British King, Lords, and Commons, over the whole British Empire.
Parliament, they held, was legally competent to tax America, as
Parliament was legally competent to commit any other act of folly or
wickedness, to confiscate the property of all the merchants in Lombard
Street, or to attaint any man in the kingdom of high treason, without
examining witnesses against him, or hearing him in his own defence. The
most atrocious act of confiscation or of attainder is just as valid an
act as the Toleration Act or the Habeas Corpus Act. But from acts of
confiscation and acts of attainder lawgivers are bou