DISCOVERY 



75 



important political family at that period in England.^ 

 All his four brothers were at one time or another in 

 Parhament, and three of them were Privy Councillors. 

 He himself and his son both became Prime Ministers, 

 the father in 1763, the son in 1807. His brother-in- 

 law, the great Pitt, \vith whom, however, he was not 

 in 1765 in agreement, had just won the Seven Years' 

 War for England ; his nephew, the younger Pitt, 

 aged only six in 1765, was to be Prime Minister before 

 he was twenty-four, and to hold that office longer than 

 any succeeding statesman. George Grenville himself 

 was industrious and capable, with considerable know- 

 ledge both of Finance and of Law. But his overlong 

 speeches bored both the King and the House 

 of Commons ; and it was unfortunate for Great 

 Britain that he was extremely obstinate, and above 

 all possessed no tact. " Able, narrow and laborious," 

 are the epithets Lord Rosebery applies to him ; 

 " He had a scientific and unimaginative temperament," 

 says Mr. G. L. Beer, the American historian, " with 

 a distinctly legal turn of mind." Some of his con- 

 temporaries were more emphatic in their opinions: 

 " I would rather," said George III after Grenville's 

 resignation, " see the devil in my closet than George 

 Grenville " ; and Horace Walpole, the diarist, calls 

 him " that mulish carthorse." - 



Let us see how Gren\'ille, with his unimaginative 

 and legal turn of mind, tackled what was undeniably 

 a difficult situation. To him, as well as to many others 

 since his time, it did seem unfair that the Mother- 

 country, with her debt doubled as the result of the 

 Seven Years' War, and paying the whole expenses of 

 the Navy, should be called upon, in addition, to pay 

 the whole cost of an army designed exclusively for 

 American defence. He accordingly, first of all, 

 passed a Sugar Tax, the most important item of which 

 was a heavy duty ~on molasses from non-English 

 Colonies — molasses being necessary for the manu- 

 facture of rum in Boston. The tax was partly to 

 protect the English ^^'est Indies producing molasses, 

 and partly to produce a revenue ; and is a good illus- 

 tration, incidentally, of the difficulties of arranging, 

 without inflicting hardships, colonial preferences within 

 an empire. 



But, though this Act was unpopular, it was the 



' For a brilliant description of Grenville's family see Chalhatn, 

 His Early Lije and Connections, by Lord Rosebery (1910). 

 pp. 130-41. 



^ Grenville's nickname at the period was " The Gentle 

 Shepherd." For in a speech in 1763 he had attacked Pitt's 

 extravagance in the Seven Years' War, and asked those Mem- 

 bers who opposed one of his budget taxes to say where a new 

 tax could be laid. " I say, sir, let them tell me where. I 

 repeat it, sir, tell me where ! " On which Pitt, who was 

 one of the Opposition, hummed to the great delight of the 

 House a then popular ditty, " Gentle Shepherd, tell me where ! " 



second of the two Acts of George Grenville round which 

 the great controversy was to rage. This was the 

 Stamp Act, ordering all bills, bonds, leases, news- 

 papers, cards and dice, etc., to have stamps, the 

 duties varying from a halfpenny to {10 ; they were 

 hke similar duties in England, only they were lighter 

 than those paid in the Mother-country. 



The Stamp Act has been fiercely attacked, and 

 England has been, and is still, accused of injustice 

 in regard to it. But it is only fair to Great Britain 

 and to George Grenville to point out that there was 

 a great deal to be said on Grenville's side. In the 

 first place, his legal position was unassailable. Parlia- 

 ment had the undoubted right to legislate for the 

 Colonies, and that included the right to make laws 

 imposing taxes, whether they were levied at the ports 

 or levied internally. No one denied that the Parha- 

 ment could legislate about Colonial Commerce ; and 

 Imperial Defence, after all, was an equally important 

 matter. 



Moreover, quite apart from what was legal, it cannot 

 be said that Grenville's position was really unreason- 

 able. After all, the proceeds from the Sugar Tax 

 and the Stamp Act were only expected to produce 

 something between half and one-third of the cost 

 of this army, the remainder being paid by the already 

 over-burdened Mother-country, whose debt had 

 doubled and expenditure increased threefold since the 

 beginning of the Seven Years' War. Moreover, as 

 Mr. Lecky points out, " Every farthing which it was 

 intended to raise in America, it was intended also to 

 spend there." Then, again, Grenville allowed a year 

 to elapse before he passed the Act in order that the 

 Colonies might think of an alternative. He called a 

 meeting of the agents of the Colonies in London and 

 said, " I am not set upon this tax ; if you can tell me 

 of a better I will adopt it." But the agents could 

 not agree upon any other tax which the Colonies 

 themselves might impose. And, though the Stamp 

 Act met with plenty of critics later, the storm it would 

 raise was not foreseen by other statesmen in England. 

 The great Pitt was ill, otherwise he would have opposed 

 it ; but the Bill was carried after a languid debate 

 in the House of Commons, and without division or 

 discussion in the House of Lords. And, indeed, both 

 the Colonial agents in England and politicians in 

 America failed to gauge the strength of the op- 

 position.' 



What happened when the Stamp .\ct^the " fatal 

 Black Act " — came into force in the Colonies, on 



3 Thus James Ingersoll, the agent of Connecticut, ob- 

 tained, and Richard Henry Lea, a prominent politician in 

 Virginia, applied for, posts in connection with the collection 

 of the Stamp Duties ; both had some difficulty in explaining 

 away their conduct later. 



