And, once kindled, it burned with an increasing flame. Within ten years it had been blown to the full blaze of revolution. Mr. Grenville had not lost his power because he had set the colonies aflame by his hated Stamp Act, but merely because the King intensely disliked his tedious manners, and resented the dictatorial tone used by the ministers in all their dealings with himself. The Marquis of Rockingham and the group of moderate Whigs who stood with him in the new ministry of July, 1765, had repealed the stamp tax, not because they deemed it wrong in legal principle, but because it had bred resistance, had made the colonists resolve not to buy goods of English merchants, or even pay the debts of £4,000,000 sterling already incurred in their business with them,—because they deemed it wise to yield, and so quiet disorders over sea. Their power lasted only a single year. The King liked their liberal principles as little as he liked Grenville’s offensive manners, and in August, 1766, dismissed them, to substitute a ministry under William Pitt, now made Earl of Chatham. Had Pitt retained his mastery, all might have gone well; but his health failed, his leadership became a mere form, real power fell to other men with no wide, perceiving vision like his own, and America was presently put once again in revolutionary mood. Pitt had said that the colonists were right when they resisted the Stamp Act: that Parliament could lawfully impose duties on commerce, and keep, if it would, an absolute monopoly of trade for the English merchants, because such matters were of the empire and not merely of America; but that the Americans were justified in resisting measures of internal taxation and government, their charters and accustomed liberties no doubt giving them in such matters constitutions of their own. Mr. Burke, whose genius made him the spokesman of the Rockingham Whigs, whether they would or no, had said very vehemently, and with that singular eloquence of his of which only his own words know the tone, that he cared not at all what legal rights might be involved; it was a question of government and of good-will between a king and his subjects; and he would not support any measure, upon whatever right it might be founded, which led to irritation and not to obedience. The new ministry of the Earl of Chatham acted upon its chief’s principles, and not upon Mr. Burke’s,—though they acted rashly because that consummate chief did not lead them. They proceeded (June, 1767), after the great earl’s illness had laid him by, to put upon the statute book two acts for the regulation of colonial trade and the government of the colonies which Charles Townshend, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, had drawn. The first provided for the more effectual enforcement of the acts of trade already in existence; the second imposed duties on wine, oil, lead, glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea carried to the colonies, and explicitly legalized the use of the hated