In the _Speech on American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed.

The true method was to find a way of peace.

"Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people.

He would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of freedom.

"The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American desire.