Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischievous, in order to preserve
trade laws that are useless. Such is the wisdom of our plan in both its members.
They are separately given up as of no value, and yet one is always to be
defended for the sake of the other; but I cannot agree with the noble lord, nor
with the pamphlet from whence he seems to have borrowed these ideas concerning
the inutility of the trade laws. For, without idolizing them, I am sure they are
still, in many ways, of great use to us; and in former times they have been of
the greatest. They do confine, and they do greatly narrow, the market for the
Americans; but my perfect conviction of this does not help me in the least to
discern how the revenue laws form any security whatsoever to the commercial
regulations, or that these commercial regulations are the true ground of the
quarrel, or that the giving way, in any one instance of authority, is to lose
all that may remain unconceded.
One fact is clear and indisputable. The public and avowed origin of this quarrel
was on taxation. This quarrel has indeed brought on new disputes on new
questions; but certainly the least bitter, and the fewest of all, on the trade
laws.
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