The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [90]
The colonies’ agents in England had already made the point that a dwindling trade would be of no benefit to Britain and insisted that molasses could not tolerate a duty of more than a penny a gallon although merchants might “silently acquiesce” to 2d.* Locally, the assemblies of Massachusetts and New York were already growling about violation of their “natural rights” in the principle of taxation and urging Connecticut and Rhode Island to join in protesting a “Mortal Wound to the Peace of these Colonies.” They resisted the principle as strongly as the actual threat to the pocket because they believed that acceptance of a precedent in parliamentary taxation would open the way to future taxes and other impositions. Colonial opinion, however, was at this stage meagerly reported, or regarded, in London.
The Board of Trade fixed the duty at 3d. and the Revenue Bill (generally known afterward as the Sugar Act) was enacted by Parliament in April 1764 with only one negative vote, by a member named John Huske, who had been born in Boston.
The Act carried a sting in its tail—as yet only in embryo—in the announcement of a projected Stamp Tax to follow. This was no horrendous device to torture Americans but one of numerous ad hoc levies used in England, in this case, a tax on letters, wills, contracts, bills of sale and other mailed or legal documents. Grenville inserted the advance notice because he was indeed aware of a lurking question about Parliament’s right to tax unrepresented subjects, which he himself considered beyond question, and he hoped “in God’s name” that it would not be made an issue in Parliament. A premise of England’s government in an age tired of struggle was to maintain a wide base of acceptable policy that would awake no sleeping dogs, the eternal wish for “consensus.” Grenville was less concerned about colonial reaction than about disturbance of a nicely reliable Parliament. He embodied notice of the Stamp Tax in the Revenue Bill, perhaps hoping that enactment would establish without fuss the principle of Parliament’s right to impose a revenue tax, or he may have intended a hint to the colonies to tax themselves, though his subsequent actions do not bear this out. A more Machiavellian motive has been advanced in the suggestion that he knew the notice would incite such bellows of colonial protest as would unite Parliament in angry assertion of its sovereignty.
The cry was indeed loud and unrestrained, but by the time it was heard, England’s attention was absorbed in an issue that awoke every sleeping dog in the country—the Wilkes case. Not that John Wilkes diverted attention from America, because there was little as yet to divert. The measures of 1763–64 were not unreasonable, nor were they folly per se, except in failing to take into account the quality, the temperament and the vital local concerns of the people to whom they applied. But heeding local concerns is not in the nature of an imperial government. The colonists were not a primitive “fluttered folk and wild” but offspring of exceptionally strong-minded and enterprising dissidents of the British breed. Essentially, the problem was attitude. The British behaved—and what is more, thought—in imperial terms as governors to the governed. The colonials considered themselves equals, resented interference and sniffed tyranny in every breeze coming over the Atlantic.
Liberty was the most intense political sentiment of the time. Government was disliked; although the streets of London were beset by assault and robbery, resistance to a police force was strong, and when Lord Shelburne was to suggest, after the days of violence, flames and deaths during the Gordon riots of 1780, that the time had come for an organized police, he was regarded as advocating a thing only suitable to French absolutism. The idea of a census was considered an intolerable intrusion. Providing information to “place-men and taxmasters,” it was denounced by a Member of Parliament in 1753 as “totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty.” If any officer should demand information