Thursday, February 09, 2006

A nice line from Schlesinger

Every so often a historian makes an observation
I can't help but record, if only for use at
parties... Here's one I read this morning,
which never occured to me:

Talking about the Sugar and Stamp Acts in the
pre-Revolutionary colonies, A. Schlesinger. Jr.
writes:

"The right to be texed in this way [only by Parliment,
as opposed to the King or House of Commons],
and in no other, as a hard-won prindciple of the British
constitution... It therefore seemed monsterous to
Americans that, in the Sugar Act and th eStamp Act,
Parliament, a body in which they had no representative,
had presumed to tax them. If Parliament could levy these
taxes, it could levy others. Once the precedent was
set, the colonists would be as badly off as England had
been before the rise of Parliament. They would,
ironically, be oppressed by the very body that had
rescued England from the same kind of tyranny.
"