How little could the wisest political seer have perceived of an elemental cause of a revolution in America, and the dismemberment of the British Empire, in two pounds and two ounces of TEA, which, a little less than two centuries ago, the East India Company sent as a present to Charles the Second of England! Little did the "merrie monarch" think, while sitting with Nell Gwynn, the Earl of Rochester, and a few other favorites, in his private parlor at Whitehall, and that new beverage gave pleasure to his sated taste, that events connected with the use of the herb would shake the throne of England, albeit a Guelph, a wiser and more virtuous monarch than any Stuart, should sit thereon. Yet it was even so; and TEA, within a hundred years after that viceregal corporation made its gift to royalty, became one of the causes which led to rebellion and revolution, resulting in the independence of the Anglo-American colonies, and the founding of our Republic. When the first exuberant feelings of joy, which filled the hearts of the Americans when intelligence of the repeal of the Stamp Act reached them, had subsided, and sober judgment analyzed the Declaratory act of William Pitt which accompanied the Repeal Bill, they perceived small cause for congratulation. They knew Pitt to be a friend--an earnest and sincere friend of the colonists. He had labored shoulder to shoulder with Barrè, Conway, Burke, and others, to effect the repeal, and had recently declared boldly in the House of Commons, "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." Yet he saw hesitation; he saw _pride_ standing in the place of _righteousness_, and he allowed _expediency_ to usurp the place of _principle_, in order to accomplish a great good. He introduced the Declaratory Act, which was a sort of salvo to the national honor, that a majority of votes might be secured for the Repeal Bill. That act affirmed that Parliament possessed the power _to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever_; clearly implying the right to impose taxes to any extent, and in any manner that ministers might think proper. That temporizing measure was unworthy of the great statesman, and had not the colonists possessed too many proofs of his friendship to doubt his constancy, they would now have placed him in the category of the enemies of America. They plainly perceived that no actual concession had been made, and that the passage of the Repeal Bill was only a truce in the systematic endeavors of ministers to hold absolute control over the Americans. The loud acclamations of joy and the glad expressions of loyalty to the king, which rung throughout America in the spring and early summer of 1766, died away into low whispers before autumn, and as winter approached, and other schemes for taxation, such as a new clause in the mutiny act developed, were evolved