all the strength of this mode of trial, Government has found it weak to support the fair trader by the punishment of the illicit one; and we cannot consent to have it abolished, till we see another equally efficient substituted in its room. Permit us to remind you, that the far greatest part of Revenue questions in this country, that is, most of the Excise ones, are not tried by Jury at all. Permit us also to remind you, that in Ireland, offences against the Revenue of Customs, are tried by the summary Excise laws, and not by Jury; and so sensible are the Irish of the necessity of doing so, that Parliamentary oppositions, violent as they are in that country, never complain of it. They know and acknowledge, that as long as Custom House causes were tried by Juries, the illicit trader was continually acquitted, to the ruin of the fair one. When you wish for impartial justice, we wish for no more; and, therefore, if you desire the trial by Jury in Revenue questions, you must take along with it a Court of Exchequer, in which that Jury is to act, and by which to be controlled, as we do in England.

When you complain of the latitude given in the Admiralty Courts, to try in one place a seizure made in another, you complain of the laws of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in all of which, a seizure made in one country can be tried in another, and brought from the extremity of the Kingdom, to be tried in the capital. When the Judge in America gives a certificate of the probable cause of seizure, to protect the prosecutor from damages, he does no more than the Judge in England is, by many Acts of Parliament, entitled to do. When the claimant of a seizure is obliged, in America, to find security before he prosecutes his claim, he does no more than the claimant in England, by Act of Parliament, is obliged to do. It is unfair to impute the last of these regulations to the present reign; for it took place by Act of Parliament in a former reign, to wit: in that of King George the First. When your Congress attempts to inflame you by the enumeration of such particulars, they ought to have told you that the freest people upon earth submit to them, because they find them all too little to encourage those who trade fairly, at the expense of those who do not.

Perhaps, with a greater semblance of justice, but not with the solidity of it, your Congress complains of the Resolutions of the two Houses of Parliament, which, about six years ago, gave force to the old laws of Henry the Eighth, by declaring that Treasons and misprisions of Treason, committed in America, might be tried in England. In these Resolutions there was surely no novelty or stretch in law to reach you. The Scotch rebels were tried for their Treasons, not in the Kingdom in which their crime was committed; the Sussex smugglers were tried for their treasons, not in the county in which their crime was committed; the murderers of Mr. Park, Governour of the Leeward Islands, in the beginning of this century, were tried for their treason, not in the quarter of the globe in which the crime was committed, for he was murdered in the West Indies, and they were tried in London, and tried too under the authority of that very Act of Henry the Eighth, which your Congress would make you believe had now, for the first time, been revived to oppress you. A similar rule of law is universal among all modern Nations which have Colonies, and was so among all ancient ones. It is founded on the great interests of society, which make it necessary, that in crimes which affect the existence of the state, the arm of the state should be felt to the very extremity of her Dominions. It is founded even upon a tenderness to the criminal and to Juries; for death inflicted by his friends is the more painful to him; and the necessity upon friends to inflict it, if they break not their oath, is the more humiliating to them. Had the Duke of Monmouth's adherents been brought to their trials in London, even before Jeffery's, the effects of them would neither have been so unpopular nor so bloody, as when they were permitted to rage in Counties obnoxious, subdued, and where every Juryman thought he threw guilt off himself, by laying it on his neighbour. The rule of law declared by the Houses, is universal through every other part of the British Dominions in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Where is the Statute, the Charter, the Act of Assembly, or the practice, which' exempted America from it? If none such is to be found, why is England accused of making a stretch when she made none? She declared the validity of her old laws; it would be well for her sons that modern whimsies were not listened to in their place.

A Court of Commission and Inquiry, in Rhode-Island, was the consequence of those Resolutions. This Court wanted not objects. There are among you who know that you escaped its justice by its mercy, while you complain of its violence. Government often throws a veil over secrets which the indiscretion of individuals would uncover. It holds proofs in its hands, but publishes them not. King William was surrounded all his life-time, in Holland and in England, with treasons which he knew of. He contented himself with disappointing them, but scarcely ever shed blood. We ask you two questions: Have no violences against Government been seen in America since the institution of that Commission? Has any man been imprisoned, fined, or executed, in consequence of a Commission, which, in the hands of some of your former Princes, would have caused all America to tremble? That Court was the creature of policy and mercy; it was sent to deter men from the commission of crimes, by the fear of punishment, but not to punish. It was only a Court of Inquiry, not of Trial, and the violences which were its objects, because imputable to passion and mistakes in opinion, have since been forgiven.

Yet, even these Resolutions of the Houses of Parliament, on the most important of all subjects, however supported by the authority of other Nations, and apparently necessary in our own, may be also the subject of fortunate regulation between us. If you will bring with you the same willingness to punish rebellion justly, which we shall bring with us not to punish the mere picture of it unjustly, we cannot well differ. Afraid of treason laws as we are, in a Nation which admits, in some extreme cases, of the lawfulness of resistance, you know us little, if you think that we will forge chains for you, which may be transferred from you to ourselves.

There remains yet one other Statute of former Administrations, to be mentioned. Several of your Assemblies had passed Acts and Votes making the paper currency of the Province a legal tender in payment of debt, although that currency was, in many places, not one-fifth in value of the money which the creditor had advanced; and these Votes and Acts were procured by the influence of those who had an interest to gain by a fraud which equally cheated the American inhabitants and the British Merchant. Parliament, with English honesty and English honour, passed an Act, which, by declaring such tenders of payment to be void in law, removed disgrace from the transactions of your private business. Was this an infringement of American Liberty? It has been called so. Let God and your own consciences determine between us if it was.

While your minds were not yet recovered from the false alarms which had been spread on account of those Statutes and Resolutions, the bankruptcy of the East India Company happened, an event which gave room for the Minister who succeeded to those we have mentioned, in the mutual connection of interests, on which the prosperity of the British Empire hangs, to relieve the distresses of that Company, and at the same time to make compensation to you for all the wrongs you imagined you had suffered; and this by an act of indulgence to both. He embraced the occasion, and succeeded in persuading Parliament to give a drawback of the greatest part of the British Duties upon Teas which should be imported into America. The East Indies and America, (as a Member of the House of Commons, who is no enemy to America, once eloquently expressed himself,) are the two wings on which the Eagle of British Commerce soars to the skies. By this indulgence a great market was opened for the Company's Teas, with which the Company was at that time overstocked; a power was given to the fair trader of America, to beat the French, Dutch, and Danish smuggler out of the field; and the inhabitant of America was furnished with Teas from England, at a cheaper rate than they were furnished to ourselves, because we paid a tax, but he drew it back. We believe there were few persons in England who did not believe at the time that the expedient was a wise, and would be a fortunate one.

How that favour has been received; what passed when these Teas were imported to Boston, we wish we could