was, however, accompanied with an express assertion, that it had been rightfully imposed. And scarcely had that tumult of opposition which it excited in America been calmed, when a new attempt was made to exercise the same right in the less troublesome and provoking mode of the imposition of a custom duty, to be levied on certain goods on their importation into the colonial ports. This attempt kindled a flame of resistance even fiercer than that which opposed the stamp-act. The colonists left it no longer doubtful whether they would submit to taxation in any form by the Legislature of the mother-country. The British government hesitated to proceed, yet was ashamed to yield. But to relinquish all pretension to the right, would, as it seemed, be feebly to abandon, in fact, the whole sovereignty of the colonics without a struggle: and this it would not be too late to do, if it should prove ultimately unavoidable, after making every effort to compel submission by military force. It was at the great crisis when the British Government was taking arms to subdue colonial rebellion, that Mr. Elliot came first into Parliament.

The members of the Legislature were far from being unanimous in the resolution to assert its su preme authority over the refractory colonies. The Opposition, against which Mr. Elliot chose to take part, was actuated by views of interest, by considerations of public expediency, by opinions concerning the principles of liberty and the just powers of governments, all peculiar, for the time, to those of whom it

was

was composed. The boldest principles, in regard to general liberty, have, from the carliest times, prevailed in Britain. Except while the isle was under the arbitrary sway of the Roman Emperors, liberty has been, at all times, practically established in the different constitutions of political society which have here been successively known. In the Saxon times, it was the state alone, not the prince, that had rights over the lands or services of freemen: and those rights of sovereignty, being only such as seemed to barbarians indispensibly necessary to the maintenance of internal order and to defence against foreign enemies, encroached but little upon the natural liberties of the people. Under that perfect feodism which, after a train of previous approaches to it, was finally established in England by the Norman conquest; the tenure of the lands was, indeed, primarily from the king, and he had a right arbitrarily to exact those services which the tenant was, by his charter, bound to pay; but so few were usually those services, and so entirely free from his prince's controul was every feudal vassal in all other respects; that, to those who lived not in a state of villanage or slavery, the feudal government was, perhaps, in its legal order and energy, a condition of more unrestrained freedom than was known in that to which it had succeeded. As new civilization advanced, the feudal chiefs were gradually divested of those proud rights by which they had been almost independent of their sovereign, while, on the other hand, the villains were emancipated, and raised to share the liberties of those who

had

had been their lords. In the reigns of Elisabeth and James I. the House of Commons, representing in the Legislature, all that part of the community which derived not their rights from having anciently held high military offices under the crown, acquired a weight and authority in the constitution, by which the benefits of freedom were diffused as extensively, and rendered as secure to the whole people, as was possible in the general state of intelligence, industry, and virtue, as they then prevailed in this isle. They who had been emancipated from villanage aspired to depress to their own level those who had once been the only freemen in the land. They who saw their feudal prerogatives abridged, were ambitious to restore these to their ancient importance. Motives of private and individual interest and resentment gave an activity to those more general and apparently patriotic ones, by which the strength of the nation was hurried into the Grand Rebellion. By the new settlement of the constitution and government, which at length ensued, the legislative authority was, in fact, so distributed, as to establish in the Legislature, and in that public opinion of which it is the organ, a permanent opposition to the influence, direct and indirect, of the crown, whether exercised in procuring the institution of new laws, or in guiding the ordinary execution of those which before existed; an opposition not essentially different from that which raised the civil war, otherwise than as being less furious in republican zeal and less energetic in its powers of mischief, but, on the other hand, less uncertain in its

existence,

existence, and adopted into the very substance of the constitution. The reigns of the two brothers, Charles and James, were employed in one continued struggle to subdue it. It triumphed in the Revolution, and, by this triumph, introduced into the government a respect for the liberties of the people, by which freedom was made as general, and raised as high, as the state of intelligence, virtue, and industry, in the country could possibly allow. Opposition to the measures of government, in the legislature and in public opinion, might have ceased with the Revolution but the private intercsts which gave all its activity could never be destroyed: and, besides, that very event itself gave birth to new prejudices and new political opinions, by which the wonted divisions were easily maintained. Upon the accession of the House of Hanover, a majority of those who substantially represented the the old feudal nobility, acquired all that efficient power which the feudal nobles had, in ancient times, often striven to usurp. Till the attachment to the Stewarts was, at last, extinguished in almost every breast, the aristrocacy successfully maintained a power which towered above the just authority of the crown, while it seemed to oppress the just liberties of the people. Upon the accession of our present sovereign, the power of the executive government, was wrested from that aristrocatical combination; and they were, at the same time, driven from their wonted ascendency in the legislature. In their struggle to regain the power which they had lost, they were not unwilling to con

jure up a storm, which they believed that they themselves might, at any time, easily lay. They hence resumed, for a time, those wild principles of liberty which had never been seriously maintained but in the midst of the great civil war, and in the very crisis of the Revolution, and taught the American colonists to speak in a tone of high remonftrance, and to determine on an obstinacy of resistance which, otherwise, their own interests and passions might not have given them resolution to adventure upon.

Sir Gilbert Elliot, though of a family of Whigs, was not led in his first engagements in political life, to foment the colonial rebellion, or to take any part with the Whig Aristocracy, in parliamentary opposition. His father was still alive; and was of that party who had the denomination of the KING'S FRIENDS, from their supposed readiness to sacrifice their own connexions and opinions, at all times, to the wishes of their prince. To subdue even by war the refractory temper of the colonists, is, even now, faid to have been a measure dear to the Sovereign himself, even more than to any of his ministers. Of course, the KING'S FRIENDS, the Earl of Mansfield, Lord Clare, afterwards Earl Nugent, Lord Barrington, the late Lord Mendip, the present Earl of Liverpool, Sir Gilbert Elliot, the father of him who is the subject of this memoir, and others of inferior consequence, who followed those as their leaders,-earnestly promoted every bold measure which tended to push the contest into a state in which the Americans might no longer be able to pretend that they were not in open rebel