"Sir, I have been charged with giving birth to sedition in America. They have spoken their sentiments with freedom against this unhappy Act, and that freedom has become their crime. Sorry I am to hear the liberty of speech in this House imputed as a crime. But the imputation shall not discourage me. It is a liberty I mean to exercise. No gentleman ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which the gentleman who calumniates it might have profited. He ought to have profited. He ought to have desisted from his project. The gentleman tells us America is obstinate, America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of Liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.... I would not debate a particular point of law with the gentleman; but I draw my ideas of Freedom from the vital powers of the British Constitution,--not from the crude and fallacious notions too much relied upon, as if we were but in the morning of Liberty. I can acknowledge no veneration for any procedure, law, or ordinance, that is repugnant to reason and the first elements of our Constitution.... The Americans have been wronged. They have been driven to madness by injustice.... Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the House what is really my opinion. _It is, that the Stamp Act be repealed, absolutely, totally, and immediately,--that the reason for the repeal be assigned, because it was founded on an erroneous principle._"[77] [76] Hansard, Parliamentary History, XVI. 140. [77] Hansard, Parliamentary History, XVI. 103-108. Bancroft, History of the United States, V. 391-395. Thus spoke this great orator, at the time tutelary guardian of American Liberty. He was not unheeded. Within less than a year from its original passage, the Stamp Act--assailed as unconstitutional on the precise grounds which I now occupy in assailing the Slave Act--was driven from the statute-book. Sir, the Stamp Act was, at most, an infringement of _civil_ liberty only, not of _personal_ liberty. How often must I say this? It touched questions of property only, and not the personal liberty of any man. Under it, no freeman could be seized as a slave. There was an unjust tax of a few pence, with the chance of amercement by a single judge without jury; but by this statute no person could be deprived of that vital right of all which is to other rights as soul to body,--_the right of a man to himself_. Who can fail to see the difference between the two cases, and how far the tyranny of the Slave Act is beyond the tyranny of the Stamp Act? The difference is immeasurable. And this will yet be pronounced by history.