and at dinner, with sixteen persons, and before all the servants, he related what had passed; and then said to the Duchess and his court, “I was against taking this step, but you would make me.” Not nine months had intervened between the dismission of his brother Mackenzie by that faction, and their abject application to the Favourite for protection. What a trade is the politician’s, when it can so debase the human mind! Comfort yourself, ye poor, ye necessitous; what is the servility of your lot compared to this of titles and riches? On the 21st of February the House of Commons came at last to the great question of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The Opposition endeavoured to fight it off by pretending fresh accounts were that very morning arrived of a disposition in some of the Colonies, particularly New York, to submit to the Act; from whence was inferred the inutility of repealing it. But this was properly treated as the lie of the day; and had no effect. General Conway moved for leave to bring in a bill to repeal that Act; and drew an affecting and alarming picture of the mischiefs it had occasioned and threatened. All orders for goods from this country were stopped: the North Americans would neither take any more, nor pay for what they had had. Eight merchants, who had received orders to the amount of 400,000_l._, had received counter-orders. The debt to those merchants amounted to 950,000_l._ Antigua was near ruined by famine. The tax fell chiefly on the poor, particularly on the poor of Georgia. At home, the situation of our manufacturers was most calamitous. Nottingham had dismissed a thousand hands: Leicester, Leeds, and other towns in proportion. Three in ten of the labourers of Manchester were discharged. The trade of England was not only stopped, but in danger of being lost. If trade suffered, land would suffer in its turn. Petitions would have been sent from every trading town in England, but that they apprehended that the very hearing of their petitions would delay the repeal. Every part of the Act breathed oppression. It annihilated juries: and the Admiralty courts might drag a man three hundred miles from his habitation. The fisheries were in equal danger. The right of taxation he did not doubt would be given for us in Westminster Hall; but the conflict would ruin both countries. We had but five thousand men in three thousand miles of territory: the Americans an hundred and fifty thousand fighting men. If we did not repeal the Act, he did not doubt but France and Spain would declare war, and protect the Americans. As the Colonies would not take our manufactures, they would set up of their own. He had a piece of cloth, he said, in his pocket, made at Philadelphia, as cheap as in England. Would the House risk the whole for so trifling an object as this Act modified?