Debate in the Commons on the Bill to restrain the Trade of the Southern Colonies of America.] March 30. The report of the Bill to restrain the Trade and Commerce of the colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, to Great Britain, Ireland, and the British islands in the West Indies, under certain conditions and limitations, being brought up, Mr. John Luttrell said: To this it was replied, that an opinion | they ever will be) equally valuable, and had obtained among the lower sort of as one and the same people, that I believe people, that they were not bound to tell it never yet occurred to the commanding the truth, because they were not upon officer of any squadron employed in times oath at the bar, as before the committee; of war, either in the West Indies, America, but that however Chant's testimony was or elsewhere, to make a particular enquiry not the only proof that the money given into their numbers; the idea would have through the hole in the malt-house was been accounted as unnecessary and strange distributed by Becket and Bye, two of as the distinction is new, ridiculous and Mr. Calthorpe's agents. The question dangerous. But, Sir, I have ever conwas at length put, and the House divided; sidered America to be a great nursery, Ayes 109, Noes 23. The same mode of where seamen are raised, trained, and reasoning was used by Mr. Dunning and maintained in times of peace to serve this two or three more, in defence of Mr. country in times of war, and though I Beckford, but the question being put, the shall readily admit, from the distance of House again divided; Ayes 104, Noes 21. their shores, that you cannot lay hands upon them the first half hour of an armament, yet am I persuaded that you may be possessed of some thousands within the time usually prescribed for the return of English seamen from foreign services. As I am up, Sir, I would wish to say a word or two upon that part of the Bill which principally relates to the commanders of his Majesty's ships of war, employed for what the Bill stiles the protection, but would be much more properly termed the destruction of the trade, and it may possibly not be found quite so easy in practice as to some people it appears in theory, either to seize these vessels, or to discover false clearances or certificates. There are those that hear me, who perfectly well remember the variety of dextrous tricks practised in the course of the late war, by almost every nation, with respect to false clearances and certificates: the difficulties attending the detection, and the uncertainty of the event. There are those in America who bear in memory the shameful decisions respecting Monto Cristo men. They will be aware that though the vessels be condemned, and shared in America, they must be liable to appeals at home, and perhaps be obliged to refund, when the seamen have spent the money, and the captain (as has been the case) is made answerable for the whole. I have no doubt but the Americans, by being put into the calamitous situation they are, and feeling the tyranny of the mother country, will endeavour to carry on a trade at the risk of the fine imposed under this act of parliament; but there are few sea officers who, after a long peace, will find money to throw away upon such ungracious prosecutions; nor do I believe that they will wish to prosecute their fel, low-subjects in a manner which may appear to them to be arbitrary and uncon[ 2 Q] have Sir; I am induced to offer a few observations upon the imperfections of the the imperfections of the Bill before you, that we may not too hastily adopt an opinion which has been frequently held forth by the friends of administration, that, provided our trade from Great Britain and Ireland should increase, though that of America do suffer, you will a greater number of seamen. Sir, it has been said, in support of the assertion I have alluded to, that very few American seamen return in English vessels from that coast. I think it a very fortunate circumstance that they do not, because we have no employment for them, and they therefore must become a burthen to this country. But I will appeal to my naval friends on the other side of the House, whose knowledge of maritime concerns is very extensive, if American scamen are not always impressed in every part of the world to man the King's ships whenever the service requires men? I am sure the books of the Northumberland, Sterling Castle, Southerland, Success, Lizard, and many other ships stationed upon the coasts of either America, in the course of the last war, will furnish us with very long lists of them; but they have hitherto been so intermixed with the seamen of this country, and always considered (as I hope [VOL. XVIII. ] stitutional; besides we have been too roughly handled by the civil law courts, to wish to have many dealings with them. Sir, on the score of seizure I shall revert to my former arguments, that the King's ships cannot keep the seas in safety, in the northern parts of the coasts of America, for more than half the year. Whenever they can cruize, the Americans will have the advantages, that a perfect knowledge of the shoals, soundings, rocks, creeks, and places of shelter can afford them; by which means they must frequently escape your most vigilant researches: besides it is not a very pleasant service for an officer to risk the King's ships upon a lee-shore, with which he is totally unacquainted, not in pursuit of an enemy, but to destroy a friend. Upon the whole, Sir, I consider this Bill to be somewhat less cruel than that which is meant to demolish the New England provinces by famine; in every other respect I hold it to be equally mischievous. It is with real concern I see humanity and sound policy giving way to that hated revenge which involves indiscriminately the innocent with the guilty. By this oppressive Act you will certainly extend the unhappy differences which already but too generally prevail in America, to every province; nay, I fear I may say, to almost every individual upon that vast continent: therefore, I protest against the measure. Mr. Temple Luttrell. Sir; it is but too visible, from the rash measures pursued by the ministers of your government here in England, and from the temper and situation of your American colonies, that a civil war will be inevitable. Gentlemen on the other side of the House have always held as a favourite proposition, that protection and obedience are reciprocal duties; and of course, that the withdrawing of the one discharges the other. Now, Sir, by these Bills you are withdrawing your protection to some purpose; I therefore presume your colonies are no longer to be treated as rebels, but, whatever may be the hazard of battle, will be entitled to the same military honours, to the same acts of clemency and of grace that are usually practised, according to the modern system of war, by every civilized nation in the world. You have a striking example of such rule of conduct from ancient time, in the most flagrant and sanguinary of all the wars the Romans ever waged: mean, the war against their own countrymen, commonly called the Social War; a war that, in many of its circumstances, bears so close a resemblance to the pre sent unhappy æra in our history, that I cannot help asking leave of the House to say a few words upon it. The passions of mankind, in the aggregate, are, throughout all ages, nearly alike; and the same probable events may, in future, be looked for from those causes to which they have heretofore been found incidental. Several confederate Italian provinces, to whose courage and industry the Roman republic, in a great measure, owed her meridian splendor, despairing to obtain, by fair means, those privileges to which they had every reasonable claim, took up arms; they founded a new capital; they consti tuted a senate to themselves, and they chose consuls. The mass of the people of Rome, who stedfastly maintained those principles, which are the genuine principles of British Whiggism-a devo tion to rational liberty, and a spirit of resistance to all exorbitant power where. soever lodged-called aloud for vengeance on their ministers and patricians, to whose iniquity they ascribed every impending evil. Sir, a resolute tribune (and I hope a worthy chief magistrate of this metropolis will now take the hint) did impeach the ostensible contrivers and managers of so unnatural a war. And recollect, Sir, how it ended: the Roman senate, though aided by their old enemies the Gauls, and by some scattered factions in the heart of the revolted country, whose patriotism, like that of certain New-Yorkists, was not quite proof against state artifices and ve nality:-I say, Sir, the Roman senate was at length compelled to cede, with a very bad grace, those terms which ought at first, in justice, to have been accorded by ami cable compact. During this civil conflict was spilt the best blood of Rome: in less than three years, near 300,000 persons fell in the field of combat. But there was a still more fatal consequence; for it was in this school that Marius, Sylla, and other aspiring leaders, learned their first rudiments of despotism, and familiarised themselves to the massacre of their fellow subjects. That sword which was unsheathed by order of the Roman senate, and under the authority of the Roman people, to deprive of the dearest rights of human nature, their allies, their associates, and brethren, was not returned into its scabbard till Rome herself had, at her inmost vitals, felt the sharpness of its edge. The generals employed on that occasion from dissezin of property, unless under a direct or effective representation in parliament. were many of them men of heroic sentiments, of humane dispositions; they might have sat for the amiable portraits which a very skilful colonist here drew of the three officers chosen to undertake a similar task on the American continent; they, too, talked of reluctance, they talked of compassion and universal philanthropy; at the very hour of encounter they announced themselves, necessitate hostes, voluntate hospites. Yet, Sir, these very men, once familiarised to domestic slaughter, and to military sway, could not prevail upon themselves to stop, till they had subverted the constitution, and totally annihilated the liberties of the whole commonwealth. In short, by this war the Romans were irrecoverably undone. Hence the perpetual dictatorship; hence the succeeding triumvirs; and at length, the throne and tyranny of Cæsar. Sir, I contend, that this our social war, like the war I have 15 been speaking of, is founded on a laudable resistance to the despotism of administration, sustained by a parliamentary majority, rather than any defection in the Americans at heart from the mother country. The generous natives of England thirst not after an unjust dominion, neither can they look with an eye of malignant jealousy on their kindred colonists, who, scarce a century ago, drew, in common with them, one parental breath. Jealousy is too mean a vice to grow in a soil with the such exalted virtues as distinguish a Briton: he seeks not the palm of victory earned at so dear a cost as by the destruction or abject servitude of millions of his fellow subjects-that too for upholding principles which he himself sanctimoniously reveres. The first duty of a good citizen is to the public; and to assert, that the supreme Sovereignty, as to the fundamentals of our constitution, be vested in any form of government whatever, or elsewhere, than with the society at large, is a traitorous doctrine, not merely against the Americans, but against our own immediate constituents here at home. The same allegiance that every private individual owes to the estates of the British monarchy, legally established, do those very estates Owe to the community in general, which hath always reserved to itself, and asserted, certain original rights of mankind, that it would be rebellion, it would be sacrilege in us to violate. One of these rights is, that every, the minutest of the component parts of this great empire, shall be free To force a tax upon your colonists, unrepresented, and universally dissentient, is acting in no better capacity than that of a banditti of robbers. Can our folly and our vanity lead us to flatter ourselves, that they will be taught by our armaments or commercial interdicts, to own for their liege lord and tax-master, the possessor of a poor solitary sheep-cote on Salisbury plain? Or that (eccentric as they are with respect to this our distant and circumscribed sphere of the British isles) they will still continue to be cajoled by the ab surd, empty plea of virtual representation? Sir, that word 'virtual' must contain in it more mystic power than the sacred archetype on Aaron's breast-plate, before it can be made to work an effect so contradictory to reason and common sense. The advocates for the coercion of America, who have frequent recourse to your written statutes, and who support their arguments as to the letter of the law, from Selden, lord Coke, and other high prerogative authorities, would do well calmly and seriously to consider of a passage in Montesquieu's divine Spirit of Laws. I allude, Sir, to a part of his comment on the triumph of the people of Old Spain over the idolatrous Mexicans; neither will it be necessary for me to point out to the House where the precise analogy lies between the first invaders of that southern continent, and our modern law-makers of the north. "Free men" says he, "they made slaves, when they made slaves free: instead of giving them the religion of peace, they inculcated on their minds a more outrageous superstition: it were impossible for me to enumerate all the good things they might have done; it were impossible for me to enumerate all the bad things which they actually did. The end of conquest is this; it leaves upon their victors (though marshalled in the best licenced cause) an immense arrear of debt to be paid off to human nature." Impious as it may seem to arraign the dispensations of Providence, I can but lament, that destiny had placed this fanciful' Montesquieu (as he is called by our celebrated pensioned essayist Dr. Johnson) in the presidency of a foreign parliament; the individual members of which, ever occupied in sacrificing to the graces, imperceptibly and totally lost their public constitution and liberty. Had, Sir, his lot been cast in this assembly to day, what There was a parliament in the reign of Henry 6, which, on account of the severity of its judgments and proscriptions against certain partizans of the York family, has gained in our annals the honourable distinction of Parliamentum Diabolicum. Now, Sir, by passing such Acts as these are, shall not we lay in a just claim to be transmitted down to posterity, if possible, under a still more infernal appellation? I am for rejecting the Bill with the deepest marks of penitence in us, for having proceeded in it thus far, and with every term of ignominy and abhorrence with respect to the wicked principle on which this, and its fellow edict for butchery and famine, the Fishery Bill, are grounded. rations of the Bill, or to abate its rigour, in case America was willing to agree to certain temporary stipulations, till the claims of one country and the rights of the other, could be fully ascertained. Lord North said, that it did not seem to him necessary that such a power should be vested in the king and council; that the operations of the Bill would cease, nay, indeed the Bill itself exist or not exist, at the option of the Americans; for if they had a mind to seek the friendship and protection of Great Britain, which was a reconciliation he sincerely wished, they would comply with the conditions of the Bill, which were a free importation and exportation, to and from the mother country as usual. Sir William Mayne declared, he did not mean to debate the principle of the Bill, and only differed as to the timing of it; that he was not in any respect altered in his sentiments, as to what ought to be the conduct of this country towards America, but only wished, that whatever mea sures were pursued might be conducted in so temperate and moderate a manner, as to induce the Americans to change their conduct towards Great Britain. He la mented that though the Boston Port Bill was well intended, yet ever since the carrying of it into execution, things had gone from bad to worse in America; to the degree, that at this moment the constitution of this country seemed to totter on its very basis; that amidst the greatest provocation this country ever received, he wished to suspend the uplifted arm of power, and give the infatuated Americans time to reflect what they had been doing, and whither their frenzy, if persisted in, must carry them; that entertaining these "sentiments, he could not give his affirma tive to the Bill, especially as he thought it would rather tend to irritate than reconcile; to unite in one common league, than to disunite the people of America. Lord North defended the Bill on the former ground of necessity. He offered a clause to prevent frauds arising in the exportation of goods of the produce of the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Newcastle." A few observations were made on this extraordinary motion; which it was said was unprecedented in the annals of parliament, that of condemning people unheard, nay even without enquiry. It was answered generally, that the House was in possession of information sufficient to warrant the insertion of the clause. The clause was agreed to, and the Bill ordered to be engrossed. Mr. Rigby pronounced the Americans to be in rebellion, and thought every Eng lishman ought to support the present mea sures; but be the event of our present disputes what it might, he never entertained a second opinion on the subject, and should never give up his sentiments upon any motive of a remote view of the consequences; for as the principles on Mr. Hartley spoke against it, as beyond which the present measure was taken up, measure cruel and oppressive. He ob- appeared to him to be right, served with great concern, that no power secondary consideration, he was resolved was vested any where to suspend the ope- never to depart from it. He then entered April 5. On the motion for the third reading of the Bill, so upon a [002 into a history of the Stamp Act; said it by making use of their necessities, and was the work of a great minister, and at-withholding from them that commerce on tributed all our present confusions to its repeal. The Marquis of Granby : which their existence depends; than a ruffian can found an equitable claim to my possessions, when he forcibly enters my house, and with a dagger at my throat, or I rise to trouble the House with a a pistol at my breast, makes me seal deeds few words on the Bill now before it. I which will convey to him my estate and have sat, Sir, during the course of two di- property. [Mr. Rigby having declared visions, without taking any part: even so the Americans to be in rebellion, lord much as giving a silent vote on any Ame- Granby, in answer, said, his ideas of rerican question: because, Sir, as I will fairly bellion were totally different from Mr.. confess to you, I entered these walls with Rigby's. If according to his ideas of reprejudices against the system administra-bellion, the Americans were in that state, tion was pursuing; I thought it was but he should be as warmly their opponent as justice to hear the arguments that might he was now their friend; and then went be urged on both sides, to compare those on.] arguments, and draw my opinion from that comparison. As to the Bill, immediately the object of our consideration, I think it in every respect so arbitrary, so oppressive, and so totally founded on principles of resentment, that I am exceedingly happy at having this public opportunity of bearing my testimony against it, in the strongest manner I am able. In God's name, what language are you now holding out to America! Resign your property, divest your selves of your privileges and freedom, renounce every thing that can make life comfortable, or we will destroy your commerce, we will involve your country in all the miseries of famine; and if you express the sensations of men at such harsh treatment, we will then declare you in a state of rebellion, and put yourselves and your families, to fire and sword. And yet, Sir, the noble lord on the floor, has just told this House, that a reconciliation is the sole object of his wishes. I hope the noble lord will pardon me, if I doubt the perfect sincerity of those wishes: at least, Sir, his actions justify my doubts; for every circumstance in his whole conduct, with regard to America, has directly militated against his present professions: and what, Sir, must the Americans conclude? Whilst you are ravaging their coasts, and extirpating their commerce, and are withheld only by your impotence, from spreading fresh ruin, by the sword, can they, Sir, suppose such chastisement is intended to promote a reconciliation, and that you mean to restore to their forlorn country those liberties you deny to their present possession; and in the insolence of persecution, are compassing earth and seas to destroy? You can with no more justice compel the Americans to your obedience, by the operation of the present measures, I have a very clear, a very adequate idea of rebellion, at least according to my own principles; and those are the princi ples on which the Revolution was founded. It is not against whom a war is directed, but it is the justice of that war that does, or does not, constitute rebellion. If the innocent part of mankind must tamely relinquish their freedom, their property, and every thing they hold dear, merely to avoid the imputation of rebellion, I beg, Sir, it may be considered, what kind of peace and loyalty there will then exist in the world, which consists only in violence and rapine, and is merely to be maintained for the benefit of robbers and oppressors. I hope, Sir, I shall be believed when I assure you that I am as warm a friend to the interests of my country as any man in this House; but then it must be understood when those interests are founded in justice. I am not attached to any particular acre of land; the farmer in Cumberland or Durham is as little connected with me as the peasant in America: it is not the ground a man stands on that attaches me to him; it is not the air he breathes that connects me with him, but it is the principles of that man, those independent, those generous principles of liberty which he professes, co operating with my own, which call me forth as his advocate, and make me glory in being considered his friend. As for myself, Sir, I am not in the least ashamed to avow that my attachment is to a noble lord, who has been, in my opinion, very unjustly reflected on in the course of this debate, (I mean lord Chatham) I am not even personally acquainted with the noble lord, I do not know the inconsistencies of which he stands accused; but this, Sir, I know, I shall not support his inconsistencies, I shall only |