128 Chapter VI
the Massachusetts towns, which the governor disbanded as an illegal body. The
Massachusetts assembly issued a circular, as in 1765, this time drafted by Samuel
Adams, inviting the assemblies of the other provinces to take joint action—a
move denounced in England as favoring “unwarrantable combinations.” Non-
importation agreements were made up and down the coast, to force British mer-
chants, as in 1765, to demand repeal of the new taxes. Duties could not be col-
lected on goods not imported. The Townshend duties were in effect nullified, as
the Stamp Act had been.
In 1770 the King made Lord North his Prime Minister. North repealed the du-
ties, except the one on tea. The tea duty remained as a kind of second declaratory
act, asserting the rights of Parliament over all subjects of the British crown.
The new outburst in America coincided with the agitation over the Middlesex
election. John Wilkes was warmly admired in America, and there was a cordial
exchange of letters between him and the Boston leaders. Others of the emerging
group of radicals in England, that is, men who did not believe in the structure of
the Commons as it then existed, men like Major John Cartwright and Richard
Price, were equally American in their sympathies. They felt, as did the Americans,
that Parliament did not represent them, or indeed did not represent anyone but
itself.
But the zealots of the House of Commons, as Professor Pares has remarked,
being uneasily aware of the peculiarities of the electoral system, were mortally afraid
of any “association” that might claim to represent anyone better than they did.^30
Any concerted manifestation of public opinion, any assembly of persons claiming
the power to speak for others, contained the threat of an “anti- Parliament.” Accord-
ing to their reading of the British constitution the House of Commons represented
the people; the people neither had nor needed any other voice or representation;
and meetings that claimed any representative function, or identified themselves
with the “people,” were to be viewed with deep suspicion. Of such unseemly preten-
sions were the Stamp Act Congress, the convention of Massachusetts towns, the
“unwarrantable combinations” of the colonial assemblies, and the public meetings
in England that supported Wilkes in the Middlesex election. Such were soon to be
the American committees of correspondence, the Continental Congress, the Irish
Volunteers, and the Yorkshire Association. And the same haunting fear of an anti-
Parliament was to be aroused, in the time of the French Revolution, by the London
Corresponding Society and the Edinburgh Convention.
Of these zealots of Parliament the principal ones were Edmund Burke and the
Rockingham Whigs. A great interest attaches to their attitude in these controver-
sies. It is understandable that George III and the majority in Parliament should
have tried to govern America, and in particular to have tried to distribute the tax
burden between American and British subjects. It is understandable that the
Americans should have resisted. One can see why Ireland became restless, and why
Englishmen wished to reform the House of Commons. It was only the Whigs,
however, who were in a position to offer any alternative to the policies pursued by
George III. Unfortunately, they had no alternative to offer. Parliamentary suprem-
30 Pares, op. cit., 52.