These were deep and weighty considerations, and, with this precipice on either hand, were young, artless, inexperienced men to date their career. Grenville, the parent of the Bill, and even fond of it beyond the love of a politician, was not a man to overlook so sudden a prospect of recovering the ground he had lost. Though he would have revelled in an opportunity of glutting his vengeance and enforcing obedience to his law, he could not but enjoy the distress to which the crisis reduced his adversaries. It suited his proud spirit to call for assertion of the Crown’s and Parliament’s dignity; and his revengeful spirit, to drive the Ministers on measures so repugnant to their principles and opinions, and, rather than not see the Colonies punished, he wished to have the punishment inflicted even by his adversaries. He toiled to obtain the most circumstantial evidence of the mutiny; he exaggerated every instance, and called aloud on the hand of power to vindicate the honour of the Legislature. As the accounts from America grew every day worse, the Ministers, who at first were inclined to repeal the Act, were borne down by the flagrancy of the provocation. But being temperate men in themselves, fixed in their principles, forseeing not only more extensive but more immediate evils from violence, (for the danger from the clamours of the merchants and trading towns increased in proportion,) and possibly indignant at the attempts made by their antagonists to drive them to extremities, they coolly and firmly resolved to remove the grievance, rather than involve their country and outlying brethren in a series of calamities more destructive of the common good than the wound given to the authority of Government. Whoever will reflect on the state of the dangers they were to encounter, and which I have specified above, must own that their conduct was virtuous, honest, prudent, humane, and brave: it will be difficult, I believe, to discover that it could be interested. This determination of the Ministers to attempt the repeal of the Stamp Act was putting their power to the test at once; and was the more adventurous, as they certainly had not taken any steps to secure the previous favour of the Crown. If on one hand they increased by this measure the animosity of Grenville and his party, and held out to him the means of making his cause common with that of the Legislature; on the other, they afforded an opportunity to Lord Bute and his faction of returning their hostilities, and of veiling his grievances under the mantle of the King’s and Parliament’s dignity. The Colonies, however pleased, could lend no support to their protectors, who, in truth, could stand on no ground at home, but on the popularity they had already acquired with the people, and should acquire with the mercantile part of the kingdom. In this exigence they lost the only real pillar of their Administration at Court.