This speech,[12] so consonant to the character of a man of business, and so unlike the wanton sallies of the man of parts and pleasure, was (however modified) but too well calculated to inflame the passions of a legislature whose authority was called in question, and who are naturally not prone to weigh the effusions of men entitled to as much freedom as themselves, while in an apparent situation of dependence. _Authority never measures liberty downwards_. Rarely is liberty supposed to mean the independence of those below us; it is our own freedom from the yoke of superiors. The Peer dreads the King, the Commoner the Peer; the Americans the Parliament. Each American trader thought himself a Brutus, a Hampden, while he wrestled with the House of Commons; yet his poor negroes felt that their master, Brutus, was a worse tyrant than Nero or Muley Ishmael. Had the Parliament of England presumed by one god-like act to declare all the slaves in our Colonies freemen, not a patriot in America but would have clamoured against the violation of property, and protested that to abolish the power of imposing chains was to impose them. O man! man! dare not to vaunt your virtue, while self-interest lurks in every pore!
The above speech could but expand the narrow heart of Grenville with triumph. It is a prophet’s holiday when woes accomplish his prediction. As mortifying was it to Conway and Lord Rockingham’s party, who had served their American brethren to so little purpose: yet they contended still for moderate measures. Dowdeswell represented that the House was not acquainted with the state of the laws in the Colonies, and which of them it would be necessary to repeal: he said, he should rather incline to enforce and amend the late Act. Beckford pleaded for the Colonies, and affirmed that they had the better of Bernard in every argument. Whether he spoke as by birth an American, or whether by concert with Lord Chatham, that while the Ministers humbled the Colonies, his lordship might still be supposed favourable to them, is uncertain,--such a duplicity from his silence ran through the whole of that his second administration. He seemed to be playing the despot, and laying in at the same time for future patriotism. Burke roundly imputed the plan to him, and called it weak, as resolutions ought to be followed by deeds; and therefore, he said, he should oppose both. He arraigned the idea of dissolving their Assemblies, at the same time that the House seemed to allow them as a co-ordinate power, since the execution of the Act was to depend on their acquiescence. Yet the suspension of all their laws would fall heavier on the innocent, than the punishment could on the guilty; and what effect would the penalty have? Would not the turbulent be re-chosen? He advised a new model of their police.