suffered, and foreshadowed the great principles of the Declaration of Independence.* "For the most trifling reasons," he wrote, "and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But, previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his Majesty's negative; thus preferring the immediate advantage of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice." Jefferson's letter, containing these remarks, and others of not less importance bearing on the rights of the colonists and the necessity of searching reforms, was presented to the convention. by Peyton Randolph, and it had a very marked effect. A resolution was passed that, after the first day of the ensuing November, the Virginians would neither themselves import slaves into the colony, nor purchase any from others. Circumstances proved too strong for this virtuous resolve; but it should be recollected to the credit of Virginia that it was affirmed by the convention of 1774.

The arrival, on the 6th of August, of the Act of Parliament for the better regulation of the province of Massachusetts complicated matters still farther. This Act abrogated to a great extent the charter of William and Mary, and substituted for its leading provisions others of which the effect was to diminish the liberties of the people in a very serious degree. The members of the Council, who had before been annually chosen by the elected representatives of the community, were from that time forward to receive their appointments from the King, and to be removable at his pleasure. Power was also conferred on the Governor, irrespective of his Council, to appoint and remove all judges of the inferior courts, justices of the peace, and officers belonging to the Council and the courts of justice. The sheriffs were to be removable by the Governor and Council as often as the latter should consider

necessary. The Chief Justice, and the judges of the superior court, were to hold their commissions during the pleasure of the King, and to depend on his good will for the amount and the payment of their salaries. The right of selecting juries was taken from the freeholders of the towns, and con

Bancroft.

ferred on the sheriffs of the counties. Moreover, the legislative powers of the town meetings, which had previously been very great, and on which the New Englanders had always set the highest value, were considerably reduced. Beyond the election of town officers and representatives at two annual meetings, the townsfolk were to enjoy no political privileges, nor even to assemble in special session, except by the written leave of the Governor, and then only for business purposes previously set forth, and sanctioned by him. Two other Acts were sent to General Gage together with the Regulating Act. These authorised him to quarter his army in towns, and to transfer to another colony, or to England, any persons informed against or indicted for crimes committed in supporting the revenue laws, or suppressing riots.

Such were the means by which the English Government provoked the discontent of the Americans to the pitch of rebellion. One might almost suppose that Ministers had taken in earnest the sarcastic advice of Franklin in a treatise which he published in 1773, under the title of "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One." In this discourse, which Swift himself could not have surpassed for wit, terse sense, concentration of thought, and masterly style, Franklin observes:

"I address myself to all Ministers who have the management of extensive dominions which from their very greatness have become troublesome to govern, because the multiplicity of their affairs leaves no time for fiddling. In the first place, gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. Turn your attention, therefore, first to your remotest provinces; that, as you get rid of them, the next may follow in order. That the possibility of this separation may always exist, take special care the provinces are never incorporated with the mother country; that they do not enjoy the same common rights, the same privileges in commerce: and that they are governed by severer laws, all of your enacting, without allowing them any share in the choice of the legislators. By carefully making and preserving such distinctions, you will (to keep to my simile of the cake) act like a wise gingerbread-baker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through in those places where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces.

"Those remote provinces have perhaps been acquired, purchased, or conquered, at the sole expense of the settlers, or their ancestors; without the aid of the mother country. If this should happen to increase her strength, by their growing numbers, ready to join in her wars; her commerce,

pre

by their growing demand for her manufactures; or her naval power, by greater employment for her ships and seamen; they may probably suppose some merit in this, and that it entitles them to some favor: you are therefore to forget it all, or resent it, as if they had done you injury. If they happen to be zealous Whigs, friends of liberty, nurtured in revolution principles, remember all that to their judice, and contrive to punish it; for such principles, after a revolution is thoroughly established, are of no more use; they are even odious and abominable. "However peaceably your colonies have submitted to your government, shown their affection to your interests, and patiently borne their grievances, you are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and treat them accordingly. Quarter troops among them, who by their insolence may provoke the rising of mobs, and by their bullets and bayonets Suppress them. By this means, like the husband who uses his wife ill from suspicion, you may in time convert your suspicions into realities. Remote provinces must have Governors and judges, to represent the Royal person, and execute everywhere the delegated parts of his office and authority. You ministers know that much of the strength of government depends on the opinion of the people; and much of that opinion on the choice of rulers placed immediately over them. If you send them wise and good men for Governors, who study the interest of the colonists, and advance their prosperity, they will think their King wise and good, and that he wishes the welfare of his subjects. If you send them learned and upright men for judges, they will think him a lover of justice. This may attach your provinces more to his government. You are therefore to be careful whom you recommend to those offices. If you can find prodigals who have ruined their fortunes, broken gamesters or stockjobbers, these may do well as Governors; for they will probably be rapacious, and provoke the people by their extortions. Wrangling proctors and pettifogging lawyers, too, are not amiss; for they will be for ever disputing and quarrelling with their little Parliaments. If withal they should be ignorant, wrongheaded, and insolent, so much the better. Attorneys' clerks and Newgate solicitors will do for chief justices, especially if they hold their places during your pleasure; and all will contribute to impress those ideas of your government that are proper for a people you would wish to renounce it. "To confirm these impressions, and strike them deeper, whenever the injured come to the capital with complaints of maladministration, oppression, or injustice, punish such suitors with long delay, enormous expense, and a final judgment in favour

107

of the oppressor. This will have an admirable effect every way. The trouble of future complaints will be prevented, and Governors and judges will be encouraged to farther acts of oppression and injustice; and thence the people may become more disaffected, and at length desperate. When such Governors have crammed their coffers, and made themselves so odious to the people that they can no longer remain among them with safety to their persons, recall and reward them with pensions. You may make them baronets too, if that respectable order should not think fit to resent it. All will contribute to encourage new Governors in the same practice, and make the supreme government detestable. "If, when you are engaged in war, your colonies should vie in liberal aids of men and money against the common enemy, upon your simple requisition, and give far beyond their abilities, reflect that a penny taken from them by your power is more honourable to you than a pound presented by their benevolence; despise, therefore, their voluntary grants, and resolve to harass them with novel taxes. They will probably complain to your Parliament that they are taxed by a body in which they have no representative, and that this is contrary to common right. They will petition for redress. Let the Parliament flout their claims, reject their petitions, refuse even to suffer the reading of them, and treat the petitioners with the utmost contempt. Nothing can have a better effect in producing the alienation proposed; for, though many can forgive injuries, none ever forgave contempt.

"In laying these taxes, never regard the heavy burdens those remote people already undergo in defending their own frontiers, supporting their own provincial Government, making new roads, building bridges, churches, and other public edifices, which in old countries have been done to your hands by your ancestors, but which occasion constant calls and demands on the purses of a new people. Forget the restraint you lay on their trade for your benefit, and the advantage a monopoly of this trade gives your exacting merchants. Think nothing of the wealth those merchants and your manufacturers acquire by the colony commerce; their increased ability thereby to pay taxes at home; their accumulating, in the price of their commodities, most of those taxes, and so levying them from their consuming customers: all this, and the employment and support of thousands of your poor by the colonists, you are entirely to forget. But remember to make your arbitrary tax more grievous to your provinces by public declarations importing that your power of taxing them has no limits; so that, when you take from them without their con

NEW YORK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. (From a Print of the period.)

Franklin goes on to suggest other tyrannical measures which the British Government had then adopted, or which it shortly afterwards carried out such as the transportation of colonists to England for trial, in the case of alleged political offences; the declaration that the En

glish Parliament had a

right to make laws binding on the colonists in all circumstances whatsoever; the sending over of revenue officers to superintend the collection of imposts, and to conduct prosecutions, which, even in the event of an acquittal, were to be at the cost of the prosecuted; the misapplication of taxes in the way of granting pensions and rewards to Governors who had distinguished themselves by enmity to the people; the appointing of Governors and judges by the King; the repeated dissolutions of the local Legislatures; the arbitrary proceedings of customs officers in the suppression of real or imaginary smuggling; the refusal to redress or even hear grievances; the hanging of those who presumed to complain; the seizing of fortified places erected at the expense of the colonists, and the turning of them to the oppression of the provinces; the sending of armies and fleets into the country; the demolishing of frontier forts, so that the savages might be encouraged to attack the outlying settlements; and the investing of the military

62-VOL. II.

2

109

Commander-in-chief with great and unconstitutional powers. These sarcasms appeared first in the Public Advertiser (Franklin being then in England), and produced so great an effect that they were

same

of England by the followers of Hengist and Horsa, and to order the measures against her that she had decreed against the Americans.* This also had a great influence amongst a certain class of politicians, and was considered to present the case of the colonists in a fair light; but the justice of the implied argument is more than doubtful. Some of the New England pa triots in the time of Charles II. had advanced the same thesis; yet it is a proposition which will not bear handling. The German invaders of England in the fifth and sixth centuries never formed a colony, of which the central seat of government was at Berlin, or any other German city. They in fact coalesced with the race they already found there, and in time created a nation distinct from the Teutonic stock, though in some degree allied to it; speaking a different language, following different ideas and traditions, and developing a novel type of political life and character. Even if at first a right of jurisdiction existed in any German kingdom (which is in the highest degree questionable, seeing

* Works of Franklin, edited by Jared Sparks, Vol. IV.

that the Britons, unlike the Red Indians, never acknowledged their subjection to a foreign ruler), such right had lapsed, owing to its not having been exercised for more than a thousand years. But the English settlements in America had always existed as colonies, and as nothing else. Neither the original settlers nor their descendants had mingled with the aborigines, so as to form a separate nation. They had always continued to be English ; they had always in terms acknowledged the sovereignty of the mother country, however much, as a matter of fact, they had defied or evaded it; and the mother country, on her part, had never ceased to assert that sovereignty. The great mistake of the Americans-one which certainly envenomed the quarrel between America and England, and made it all the more difficult of adjustment, though this, of course, does not excuse the tyrannies of George III. and his Ministers-was in the denial of all practical jurisdiction by the parent State, and that at the very time when they were asserting their hereditary rights under the British Constitution.

But considerations of this nature have very little weight with people who are smarting under a sense of wrong. The Regulating Act exasperated the American colonists to the utmost, and they resolved to disregard its provisions. The councillors appointed by the King took the oaths of office within a few days after the receipt of the Act; but the committee of Boston, seeing clearly the gravity of the crisis, sent a circular to the other towns of the province, suggesting the necessity of united action in resisting the policy of the Imperial Government. One of the answers to this appeal plainly hinted at civil war as the result of that policy. "Is a glorious death in defence of our liberties," asked the authors of this reply, "better than a short, infamous life, and our memories to be had in detestation to the latest posterity? Let us all be of one heart, and stand fast in the liberties wherewith Christ has made us free; and may He, of His infinite mercy, grant us deliverance out of all our troubles!" Meetings, at which counsel was taken of the ministers of religion, and of others celebrated for piety, as in the old days of Puritanism, were held in various places; and the shire of Worcester summoned a county congress, at which it was expressly declared that the violation of the Massachusetts charter by the British Government was equivalent to a dissolution of the union of the provinces with England. Signs of military preparation, moreover, were not wanting on the part of the colonists. The several companies of militia were paraded for discipline in the towns

and villages, and it was calculated that, out of a total population in the province of 400,000, the number of men between sixteen and sixty, most of whom possessed arms, and were trained to the use of them, was about 120,000. When Putnam, of Connecticut, a hero of the old wars with France, was told that twenty ships of the line and twenty regiments were expected from England in case Boston should not at once submit, he replied that he was ready to treat them as enemies. This must have sounded at the time like boasting, and doubtless many people laughed; but it expressed the real determination of the American people, and the end proved that it was no idle vaunt.

The time for holding the General Congress was now approaching. As the delegates from Massachusetts were being escorted by large numbers of the populace in the direction of Philadelphia, in the month of August, they received from Hawley, the patriot of Northampton, a letter strongly counselling a resort to arms, if they could in no other way rid themselves of British taxation. Hawley admitted that there was not then heat enough for battle; but constant and negative resistance would increase it. There was not military skill enough; but that was improving, and must be encouraged "Fight we must finally, unless Britain retreats," he added. "But it is of infinite consequence that victory be the end of hostilities. If we get to fighting before necessary dispositions are made for it, we shall be conquered, and all will be lost for ever." He therefore recommended the laying of an adequate supply of arms and military store. and the formation of a bond of union, so that every grievance of any one colony should be regarded as an injury to the whole. Some plan, he thought, should be settled for a continuation of Congresses, even though such assemblies should be denouncel by Parliament as high treason, as he believed they soon would be. Such were the sentiments with which the Massachusetts delegates proceeded to Philadelphia to attend the Congress. The feeling they expressed was general throughout the provinc. The people of the town of Worcester, apprehending a special effort to enforce the Regulating Act, manufactured arms and cast musket-balls, threatening to attack any body of soldiers whom Gag should send against them. The councillors ap pointed by mandamus felt the difficulty and even danger of their position. Some refused to accept their commissions; some who had consented to serve, declined to take any active part. Among the latter, one was menaced with death by his offended fellow-townsmen. Others were forced to resign by crowds of armed men, who plainly int