Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/355

 it. They tell you they will not submit to them; and I tell you the acts must be repealed; they will be repealed; you cannot enforce them. The ministry are checkmated; they have a move to make on the board; yet not a move, but they are ruined. Repeal, therefore, my lords, I say. But bare repeal will not satisfy this enlightened and spirited people. What! repeal a bit of paper! repeal a piece of parchment! That alone will not do, my lords. You must go through the work—you must declare you have no right to tax —then they may trust you; then they will have some confidence in you."

The eloquent advocate of truth and justice concluded in these words: "My lords, deeply impressed with the importance of taking some healing measures at this most alarming, distracted state of our affairs, though bowed down with a cruel disease, I have crawled to this house, to give you my best counsel and experience; and my advice is, to beseech his majesty to withdraw his troops. This is the best I can think of. It will convince America that you mean to try her cause, in the spirit, and by the laws of freedom and fair inquiry, and not by codes of blood. How can she now trust you, with the bayonet at her breast? She has all the reason in the world now to believe you mean her death, or her bondage. Thus entered on the threshold of this business, I will knock at your gates for justice without ceasing, unless inveterate infirmities stay my hand. My lords, I pledge myself never to leave this business. I will pursue it to the end in every shape. I will never fail of my attendance on it at every step and period of this great matter, unless nailed down to my bed by the severity of disease. My lords, there is no time to be lost; every moment is big with dangers. Nay, while I am now speaking, the decisive blow may be struck, and millions involved in the consequences. The very first drop of blood will make a wound that will not easily be skinned over. Years, perhaps ages, may not heal it. It will be immedicabile vulnus: a wound of that rancorous, malignant, corroding, festering nature, that, in all probability, it will mortify the whole body. Let us, then, my lords, set to this business in earnest; not take it up by bits and scraps as formerly, just as exigencies pressed, without any regard to general relations, connections, and dependencies. I would not, by any thing I have said, my lords, be thought to encourage America to proceed beyond the right line. I reprobate all acts of violence by her mobility. But when her inherent constitutional rights are invaded, those rights which she has an equitable claim to enjoy by the fundamental laws of the English constitution, and which are engrafted thereon by the unalterable laws of nature, then I own myself an American, and feeling myself such, shall, to the verge of my life, vindicate those rights against all men who strive to trample upon or oppose them."

Mr. Josiah Quincy, who was in the gallery of the House at the time and heard this speech, speaks of it in rapturous terms: it is to him that we are indebted for the able manner in which it has been reported. Lord Camden