130 Chapter VI
continued to see in the Rockingham Whigs only a group of malcontents out of
office, and to give their votes to Lord North and the King.
The Whigs of the Burke and Rockingham persuasion, aristocratic though they
were in their principles, and inclined to keep all political discussion within the
bounds of Parliament itself, did greatly contribute to the awakening of extra-
parliamentary or public opinion. Unheeded within the two houses, they went out
of doors, and offered themselves as the leaders of an indignant people, hoping that
the “people” were indignant at the same mischief as the Whigs were. At bottom,
they could agree neither with the British reformers nor with the Americans. But
they had invited merchants to protest against the Stamp Act. They defended Wil-
kes in the affair of the Middlesex elections. They fanned the discontent in Amer-
ica; Burke himself acted as agent for New York, and had a long correspondence
with the New York assembly, in which he gave them his expert advice on how and
when to resist the government in Great Britain. By their harping on the sinister
designs of the King, by their hints of a kind of ministerial conspiracy to pervert
Parliament, they did more than any other group in England to inculcate in Amer-
ica a hatred for British practices of government, and to undermine in America
that respect for Parliament which it was the great Whig principle to uphold.
When the Whigs said that Parliament was the proper seat of sovereignty for the
whole empire, the Americans paid little attention. When they said that Parliament
was corrupt, the Americans took them at their word.^31
THE SECOND AMERICAN CRISIS: THE COERCIVE ACTS
AND THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESSIt must be admitted that the British government had many interests to consider,
which the Americans significantly dismissed as foreign. The British government,
in its own way, tried to do something for the West India sugar planters, the Ameri-
can Indians, the French Canadians, and the British taxpayers. Its policies in Amer-
ica were in part shaped by these needs. The Americans recognized no such needs
as proper determinants of policy in America. There had ceased to be, in Rousseau’s
phrase, any general will for the empire as a whole, by which the Americans would
accept sacrifices in the interests of others with whom they felt common ties. In
1773 the government at Westminster decided to do something for the East India
Company, which had been brought to the verge of bankruptcy by its political ex-
pansion in India, and whose activities the government was now trying to subordi-
nate to parliamentary control. The company, having an excess supply of tea, was
authorized to sell 10,000,000 pounds of it in America. Since the Americans, to
nullify the Townshend tea duty, had to a large extent been using smuggled tea, or
31 The views of Pares, Guttridge, and Ritcheson coincide in this estimate of the Old Whig atti-
tude to America, and of Burke as a spokesman for the British aristocracy; this estimate is, indeed, a
well- established one, from which only “new conservatives” and other neo- Burkeans in the United
States seem to diverge.