The Speech of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham, in the House of Lords, upon Reading the Amendments in the Quebec Bill, on Friday, the 17th of June, 1774. Together with His Lordship's Speech on the Third Reading, in the House of Lords...
- William Pitt (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
Here’s a summary based on the content of that speech:
In this 1774 address to the House of Lords, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, denounced the amended Quebec Bill as a tyrannical and despotic measure that would subject a vast new territory to arbitrary rule while stripping away trial by jury and other fundamental legal protections rooted in English liberty. He argued that the bill’s expansive scope and disregard for constitutional safeguards made it destructive of the very freedoms that should underpin any government, framing his objections within the broader imperial crisis brewing between Britain and its American colonies. The accompanying speech from the bill’s third reading extended this critique to related measures for quartering British troops in America, reflecting Chatham’s consistent opposition to policies he saw as eroding colonial liberties in the years just before the American Revolution.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.