possible, for your rights? And wherein is our case different, if the people of England choose legislators for the people of America?

"If they have a spark of virtue left, they will blush to be found in a posture of hostility against Great Britain."

There was no posture of hostility in America, but Britain put herself in a posture of hostility against America. Witness the landing of the troops in Boston, 1768.

OBSERVATIONS

ON PASSAGES IN

"A LETTER

FROM

A MERCHANT IN LONDON

TO HIS NEPHEW IN NORTH AMERICA.

LONDON, 1766.”*

Extract. "THE honest indignation you express against those artifices and frauds, those robberies and insults, which lost us the hearts and affections of the Indians, is particularly to be commended; for these were the things, as you justly observed, which involved us in the most bloody and expensive war that ever was known."

Observation. This is wickedly intended by the author, Dean Tucker, to represent the North Americans as the cause of the war. Whereas it was in fact begun by the French, who seized the goods and persons of the English traders on the Ohio, who encroached on the King's land in Nova Scotia, and took a fort from the Ohio Company by force of arms, which induced England to make reprisals at sea, and to send Braddock to recover the fort on the Ohio, whence came on the war.

"By the spirit of Magna Charta all taxes laid on by Parliament are constitutional, legal taxes."

* Marginal notes in Franklin's Pamphlets in the Philadelphia Athenæum. See above, pp. 206, 211.-EDITOR.

There is no doubt but taxes laid by Parliament, where the Parliament has jurisdiction, are legal taxes; but does it follow, that taxes laid by the Parliament of England on Scotland before the union, on Guernsey, Jersey, Ireland, Hanover, or any other dominions of the crown not within the realm, are therefore legal? These writers against the colonies all bewilder themselves by supposing the colonies within the realm, which is not the case, nor ever was. This then is the spirit of the constitution, that taxes shall not be laid without the consent of those to be taxed. The colonies were not then in being, and therefore nothing relating to them could be literally expressed. As the Americans are now without the realm, and not of the jurisdiction of Parliament, the spirit of the British constitution dictates, that they should be taxed only by their own representatives, as the English are by theirs.

"Now the first emigrants, who settled in America, were certainly English subjects, subject to the laws and jurisdiction of Parliament, and consequently to parliamentary taxes, before the emigration, and therefore subject afterwards, unless some legal constitutional exemption can be produced."

This position supposes, that Englishmen can never be out of the jurisdiction of Parliament.

It may as well be said, that wherever an Englishman resides, that country is England. While an Englishman resides in England, he is undoubtedly subject to its laws. If he goes into a foreign country, he is subject to the laws and government he finds there. If he finds no gov

ernment or laws there, he is subject there to none, till he and his companions, if he has any, make laws for themselves; and this was the case of the first settlers in America. Otherwise, and if they carried the English laws and power of Parliament with them, what

advantage could the Puritans propose to themselves by going, since they would have been as subject to bishops, spiritual courts, tithes, and statutes relating to the church, in America as in England? Can the Dean, on his principles, tell how it happens, that those laws, the game acts, the statutes for laborers, and an infinity of others, made before and since the emigration, are not in force in America, nor ever were?

Now, upon the first settling of an English colony, and before ever you Americans could have chosen any representatives, and therefore before any assembly of such representatives could have possibly met, to whose laws and to what legislative power were you then subject? To the English, most undoubtedly; for you could have been subject to no other."

The author here appears quite ignorant of the fact. The colonies carried no law with them; they carried only a power of making laws, or adopting such parts of the English law, or of any other law, as they should think suitable to their circumstances. The first settlers of Connecticut, for instance, at their first meeting in that country, finding themselves out of all jurisdiction of other governments, resolved and enacted, that, till a code of laws should be prepared and agreed to, they would be governed by the law of Moses, as contained in the Old Testament.

If the first settlers had no right to expect a better constitution, than the English, what fools were they for going over, to encounter all the hardships and perils of new settlements in a wilderness! For these were so many additions to what they suffered at home, from tyrannical and oppressive institutions in church and state; with a subtraction of all their old enjoyments of the conveniences and comforts of an old-settled country, friends, neighbours, relations, and homes.

66

Suppose, therefore, that the crown had been so ill advised as to have granted a charter to any city or county here in England, pretending to exempt them from the power and jurisdiction of an English Parliament. Is it possible for you to believe an absurdity so gross and glaring?"

The American settlers needed no exemption from the power of Parliament; they were necessarily exempted, as soon as they landed out of its jurisdiction. Therefore, all this rhetorical paragraph is founded on a mistake of the author, and the absurdity he talks of is of his own making.

"Good heavens! What a sudden alteration is this! An American pleading for the extension of the prerogative of the crown! Yes, if it could make for his cause; and for extending it, too, beyond all the bounds of law, of reason, and of common sense!"

What stuff! Why may not an American plead for the just prerogatives of the crown? And is it not a just prerogative of the crown to give the subjects leave to settle in a foreign country, if they think it necessary to ask such leave? Was the Parliament at all considered, or consulted, in making those first settlements? Or did any lawyer then think it necessary?

"Now this clause, which is nothing more than the renunciation of absolute prerogative, is quoted in our newspapers, as if it was a renunciation of the rights of Parliament to raise taxes."

It was not a renunciation of the rights of Parliament. There was no need of such a renunciation, for Parliament had not even pretended to such a right. But, since the royal faith was pledged by the King for himself and his successors, how can any succeeding King, without violating that faith, ever give his assent to an act of Parliament for such taxation?