Note 288 — Chapter XII

General Conway, as leader of the House of Commons, moved the resolution for the repeal of the Stamp Act, and also moved the resolution for the Declaratory Bill. Colonel Barré moved an amendment to strike out from the resolution the words "in all cases whatsoever." He was seconded by Pitt, and sustained by Beckford. "Only three men, or rather Pitt alone, 'debated strenuously the rights of America' against more than as many hundred; and yet the House of Commons, half-conscious of the fatality of its decision, was so awed by the overhanging shadow of coming events that it seemed to shrink from pronouncing its opinion. Edmund Burke, eager to add glory as an orator to his just renown as an author, argued for England's right in such a manner that the strongest friends of power declared his speech to have been 'far superior to that of every other speaker;' while Grenville, Yorke, and all the lawyers; the temperate Richard Hussey, who yet was practically for humanity and justice; Blackstone, the commentator on the laws of England, who still disliked internal taxation of America by Parliament, filled many hours with solemn arguments for England's unlimited supremacy. They persuaded one another, and the House, that the Charters which kings had granted were, by the unbroken opinions of lawyers, from 1689, subordinate to the good-will of the Houses of Parliament; that Parliament, for a stronger reason, had power to tax—a power which it had been proposed to exert in 1713, while Harley was at the head of the Treasury, and again at the opening of the Seven Years' War." ...

"So the watches of the long winter's night wore away, and at about four o'clock in the morning, when the question was called, less than ten voices, some say five, or four, some said but three, spoke out in the minority; and the resolution passed for England's right to do what the Treasury pleased with three millions of freemen in America." (Bancroft's History of the United States., Vol. V., pp. 415-417.)