Note 287 — Chapter XII

In the House of Lords, Lord Mansfield, replying to Lord Camden, said: "The noble lord who quoted so much law, and denied the right of the Parliament of Great Britain to levy internal taxes upon the colonies, allowed at the same time that restrictions upon trade and duties upon the ports were legal. But I cannot see any real difference in this distinction; for I hold it to be true, that a tax laid in any place is like a pebble falling into and making a circle in a lake, till one circle produces and gives motion to another, and the whole circumference is agitated from the centre. A tax on tobacco, either in the ports of Virginia or London, is a duty laid upon the inland Plantations of Virginia, a hundred miles from the sea, wherever the tobacco grows." (Quoted in Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. V., p. 411.)

Mr. Grenville argued in the same strain in the House of Commons; and the Americans, as apt pupils, soon learned by such arguments to resist external as they had successfully resisted internal taxes.