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480 surest guide for English statesmen, but the present Ministers were reverting to the precedents of the Stuart period. It was the lurking spirit of despotism that produced the Stamp Act in 1765; that fettered the repeal of that Act in 1766; that revived the principle of it in 1767; and had since accumulated oppression upon oppression. But if the ideas of the Ministers were odious, the means by which they sought to carry them out were still more so. They had gone about begging for troops from every petty potentate in Germany. They had not scrupled to arm the Roman Catholics of Canada against the Protestants of New England, and to let loose the savage Indian nations of the interior against the civilized inhabitants of the Colonies. Ministers were, however, he confessed, able to do what they liked while Parliament was constituted as it was. Not only did Parliament misrepresent the nation, but the Ministers had corrupted the Parliament. Parliament was full of placemen, pensioners and contractors, and as regarded the support of the landed interest, which was so frequently appealed to, the landed interest was neither the whole nation, nor always the most enlightened portion of it. It was idle, therefore, to talk of the nation wishing this, or the nation wishing that. It was not the nation, but only Parliament that spoke, and Parliament was dictated to by Ministers, who were themselves the creatures of the King. For many years, he insisted, a fatal and overruling influence had governed the country. Lord Mansfield was the real Prime Minister, and through his despotic counsels a Great Empire was being plunged in all the miseries and horrors of civil war, while the domestic liberties of the country were equally endangered. In how odious a light the conduct of the Ministers appeared to the people at large, might, he said, be judged from the unpopularity of both the services. The resistance of the City authorities to the press warrants had met with as much approval as it had met with disapproval when the question was not of fighting the Colonies but of fighting Spain, and the first lord of the Admiralty had had to threaten officers, who