Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/31

Rh all other powers of Government which he maintained to be possessed by England over the colonies; and he either suggested, or at all events supported, the idea of a Parliamentary declaration of these powers when the Stamp Act was repealed. The declaration actually made, however, was not in accordance with his avowed opinions, which were expressed in the House of Lords by Camden, who said, "The resolution now proposed is in my opinion too general, as it gives the legislature an absolute power of laying a tax on America."

The Annual Register of 1766, at that time conducted by Burke, recognized and set out the three sets of opinions which were held by different parties on the American question, and especially alluded to Pitt as denying the rights of Parliament to tax the colonists. Pitt and his friends assisted Rockingham in obtaining the repeal of the Stamp Act, but the difference between doing this in obedience to a broad constitutional principle which denied the right to tax an unrepresented people and doing it as an act of political expediency, was soon fatally manifest. The distinction which Pitt raised between the taxing power and the other powers of Government was scarcely definable, and not at all capable of practical maintenance. The next year, when the great minister—then Earl of Chatham—was in office, duties were levied on glass, paper, and pasteboard, red lead and colours, and tea, and the signal thereby given which led to the war and the independence of the colonies. This was in the first stages of that long illness which seemed to shroud the mind as much as it prostrated the body of the minister; but he was evidently more impressed with the duty of asserting the general power of government than of sustaining the constitutional right on which he had before insisted, and the place that he left was not filled on this occasion by any other champion, so that the new Act was passed as easily and with as little opposition as that which had been recently repealed.

The history of the unhappy conflict which ensued has not to be dealt with here; it is sufficient to notice the failure of the efforts in which, on his recovery, Chatham joined with the