ABSTRACT
In 1768, Chancellor Charles Townshend introduced duties on various goods imported into the American colonies in an attempt to raise revenue in the wake of the failed Stamp Act. The Townshend Duties were specifically on imports, in answer to colonial objections that stamp duties represented ‘internal’ taxation on domestic transactions, implying that ‘external’ taxation was legitimate. In A Letter to the Right Honourable Wills Earl of Hillsborough, George Canning addresses this issue as well as others that had arisen since Parliament began taxing colonists directly since 1764. Canning presents himself as an iconoclast, claiming to ‘bring no other weapon into the field of ratiocination than plain good sense, supported by a general information as to facts, and a tolerable insight into the topicks of argument’, as ‘Reason, abstracted from fact and experience, will always degenerate into fancy and caprice’. He reveals his ideology, even while affecting anti-intellectuality.
