The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II | Page 5

the whole
consideration,) have taxed these commodities. The same may be said of
glass. Besides, some of the things taxed were so trivial, that the loss of
the objects themselves, and their utter annihilation out of American
commerce, would have been comparatively as nothing. But is the
article of tea such an object in the trade of England, as not to be felt, or
felt but slightly, like white lead, and red lead, and painters' colors? Tea
is an object of far other importance. Tea is perhaps the most important
object, taking it with its necessary connections, of any in the mighty
circle of our commerce. If commercial principles had been the true
motives to the repeal, or had they been at all attended to, tea would
have been the last article we should have left taxed for a subject of

controversy.
Sir, it is not a pleasant consideration, but nothing in the world can read
so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of ministry in this
business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal ideas in the
management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the state
looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected
view. They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and
one pretence, and some at another, just as they pressed, without any
sort of regard to their relations or dependencies. They never had any
kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some
miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties
into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these
shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to
pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous
courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to
disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble
councils, so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so
insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken
the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.
Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of
general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were
distressed in the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know
what sort of things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that
significant appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that
danger, which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to
display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The
monopoly of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial
revenues had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was
your representation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of
ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the
operation of an injudicious tax, and rotting in the warehouses of the
Company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that series of
desperate measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in
consequence of it. America would have furnished that vent, which no
other part of the world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a
necessary of life, and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope
our dear-bought East India Committees have done us at least so much

good, as to let us know, that, without a more extensive sale of that
article, our East India revenues and acquisitions can have no certain
connection with this country. It is through the American trade of tea
that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you
with their burden. They are ponderous indeed; and they must have that
great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the
same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of the
East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will
be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies to every
nation but yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty
words of a preamble. It must be given up. For on what principle does it
stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a
description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but
too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,--a preambulary tax. It is,
indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax
of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers or
satisfaction to the subject.
Well! but whatever it is, gentlemen