XXXVIII ment, or until the Colonies shall have dropped the CHAP. point of right. Nor can the conduct of the people of Boston without a severe censure." A very long Dec. pass discussion ensued; but he was inflexible. It became evident that the attention of Parliament was to be confined to the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay; for the Memorial and the Remonstrance from Virginia were kept back; and a Petition from the Assembly of Pennsylvania to the House of Commons was put aside. The next day Beckford and Trecothick, as friends to America, demanded rather such general inquiry, as might lead to measures of relief. 2 "The question of taxation is not before us;" interposed Lord North; "but the question is, whether we are to lay a tax one year, when America is at peace, and take it off the next, when America is in arms against us. I am against the repeal of the Act; it would spread an alarm, as if we did it from fear. The extraordinary appearance this would have in America, the encouragement it would give our enemies and the discouragement it would give our friends, the impossibility of acting with authority, if our authority should receive another wound,—all bind us not to take that question into consideration again.” He, therefore, demanded the expression of the united opinion of Great Britain, so that Boston might be awed into obedience. "The Americans believe," rejoined Beckford, "that there is a settled design in this country to rule them 1768. 'See Account of the Day in Garth to Committee of South Carolina, 10 Dec. 1768. Also in W. S. Johnson to Gov. of Connecticut, 3 XXXVIII Dec. CHAP. With a military force." "I never wish for dominion, unless accompanied by the affection of the people De governed;" said Lord John Cavendish. "Want of knowledge, as well as want of temper," said Lord Beauchamp, "has gradually led us to the brink of a precipice, on which we look down with horror."— Phipps, a captain in the army, added, "My heart will bleed for every drop of American blood that shall be shed, whilst their grievances are unredressed. I wish to see the Americans in our arms as friends-not to meet them as enemies." "Dare you not trust yourselves with a general inquiry?" asked Grenville. "How do we know, parliamentarily, that Boston is the most guilty of the Colonies?" "I would have the Americans obey the laws of the country whether they like them or no; " said Lord Barrington. The house divided, and out of two hundred who were present, one hundred and twenty-seven voted with the Government to confine the inquiry. The King set himself, and his Ministry, and Parliament, and all Great Britain, to subdue to his will one stubborn little town on the sterile coast of the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fearful; but it showed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen to keep guard over the liberties of mankind. The old world had not its parallel. It counted about sixteen thousand inhabitants of European origin, all of whom learned to read and write. Good public schools were the foundation of its political system; and Benjamin Franklin, one of their pupils, in his youth apprenticed to the art which makes knowledge the common property of mankind, had gone forth from them to stand before the nations as the representative of the modern plebeian class. XXXVIII 1768. As its schools were for all its children, so the great CHAP. body of its male inhabitants of twenty-one years of age, when assembled in a Hall which Faneuil, of Dec. Huguenot ancestry, had built for them, was the source of all municipal authority. In the Meeting of the Town, its taxes were voted, its affairs discussed and settled; its agents and public servants annually elected by ballot; and abstract political principles freely debated. A small property qualification was attached to the right of suffrage, but did not exclude enough to change the character of the institution. There had never existed a considerable municipality, approaching so nearly to a pure democracy; and, for so populous a place, it was undoubtedly the most orderly and best governed in the world. Its ecclesiastical polity was in like manner republican. The great mass were congregationalists; each church was an assembly formed by voluntary agreement; self-constituted, self-supported and independent. They were clear that no person or church had power over another church. There was not a Roman Catholic altar in the place; the usages of "papists" were looked upon as worn-out superstitions, fit only for the ignorant. But the people were not merely the fiercest enemies of "popery and slavery;" they were Protestants even against Protestantism; and though the English church was tolerated, Boston kept up its exasperation against prelacy. Its Ministers were still its prophets and its guides; its pulpit, in which, now that Mayhew was no more, Cooper was admired above all others for eloquence and patriotism, by weekly appeals inflamed alike the fervor of piety and of liberty. In the Boston Gazette, it enjoyed a free Press, which gave cur VOL. VI.-21 CHAP. rency to its conclusions on the natural right of man to self-government. XXXVIII 1768. Dec. Its citizens were inquisitive; seeking to know the causes of things, and to search for the reason of existing institutions in the laws of nature. Yet they controlled their speculative turn by practical judg ment; exhibiting the seeming contradiction of susceptibility to enthusiasm, and calculating shrewdness. They were fond of gain, and adventurous, penetrating and keen in their pursuit of it; yet their avidity was tempered by a well-considered and continuing liberality. Nearly every man was struggling to make his own way in the world and his own fortune; and yet individually and as a body they were publicspirited. In the seventeenth century the community had been distracted by those who were thought to pursue the great truth of justification by faith to Antinomian absurdities; the philosophy of the eighteenth century had not been without an influence on theological opinion; and though the larger pumber still acknowledged the fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest against Calvinism. Still more were they boldly speculative on questions respecting their constitution. Every house was a school of politics; every man was a little statesman, discussed the affairs of the world, studied more or less the laws of his own land, and was sure of his ability to ascertain and to make good his rights. The ministers, whose prayers, XXXVIII 1768. Dec. being from no book, were colored with the hue of CHAP. the times; the merchants, cramped in their enterprise by legal restrictions; the mechanics, who, by their skill in ship-building bore away the palm from all other nations, and by their numbers were the rulers of the town; all alike, clergy and laity, in the pulpit or closet, on the wharf or in the counting-room, at their ship-yards or in their social gatherings, reasoned upon government. They had not acquired estates by a feudal tenure, nor had lived under feudal institutions; and as the true descendants of the Puritans of England, they had not much more of superstitious veneration for monarchy than for priestcraft. Such was their power of analysis, that they almost unconsciously developed the theory of an independent representative commonwealth; and such their instinctive capacity for organization, that they had actually seen a Convention of the people of the Province start into life at their bidding. While the earth was still wrapt in gloom, they welcomed the daybreak of popular freedom, and like the young eagle in his upward soarings, looked undazzled into the beams of the morning. |