duced to obedience, may that obedience be secured by stricter laws and stronger obligations.

Nothing can be more noxious to society than that erroneous clemency which, when a rebellion is suppressed, exacts no forfeiture and establishes no securities, but leaves the rebels in their former state. Who would not try the experiment which promises advantage without expense? If rebels once obtain a victory, their wishes are accomplished; if they are defeated, they suffer little, perhaps less than their conquerors; however often they play the game, the chance is always in their favour. In the meantime they are growing rich by victualing the Troops that we have sent against them, and perhaps gain more by the residence of the Army than they lose by the obstruction of their Port.

Their Charters being now, I suppose, legally forfeited, may be modelled as shall appear most commodious to the mother country. Thus, the privileges which are found by experience liable to misuse, will be taken away, and those who now bellow as Patriots, bluster as Soldiers, and domineer as Legislators, will sink into sober Merchants, and silent Planters, peaceably diligent, and securely rich.

But there is one writer, and perhaps many who do not write, to whom the contraction of these pernicious privileges appears very dangerous, and who startle at the thoughts of England free and America in chains. Children fly from their own shadow, and rhetoricians are frighted by their own voices. Chains is undoubtedly a dreadful word; but perhaps the masters of civil wisdom may discover some gradations between chains and anarchy. Chains need not be put upon those who will be restrained without them. This contest may end in the softer phrase of English superiority and American obedience.

We are told that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

But let us interrupt awhile this dream of conquest, settlement, and supremacy. Let us remember that being to contend, according to one Orator, with three millions of Whigs, and according to another, with ninety thousand Patriots of Massachusetts Bay, we may possibly be checked in our career of reduction. We may be reduced to peace upon equal terms, or driven from the Western Continent, and forbidden to violate a second time the happy borders of the land of liberty. The time is now perhaps at hand which Sir Thomas Brown predicted between jest and earnest,

When America shall no more send out her treasure,
But spend it at home in American pleasure.

If we are allowed, upon our defeat, to stipulate conditions, I hope the treaty of Boston will permit us to import into the confederated Cantons such products as they do not raise, and such manufactures as they do not make and cannot buy cheaper from other Nations, paying like others the appointed customs; that if any English Ship salutes a Fort with four guns, it shall be answered at least with two; and that if an Englishman be inclined to hold a Plantation he shall only take an oath of allegiance to the reigning powers, and be suffered, while he lives inoffensively, to retain his own opinion of English rights, unmolested in his conscience by an oath of abjuration.

AN ANSWER TO A PAMPHLET, ENTITLED "TAXATION NO TYRANNY;" ADDRESSED TO THE AUTHOR AND TO PERSONS IN POWER.*

The importance of the subject, the crisis of time in which I write, and the notoriety of your style and character, make it unnecessary for me to use a preface.

The very title of your Pamphlet is delusion. No man has ever said that Taxation is, in itself, tyranny; nor will you say that it may not become so by abuse, or by want of authority in the imposers of it. Had your title said, "that the British Parliament is the proper and constitutional body for taxing the Colonies," you would not have misstated the question. But that would not have tended to ensnare an inattentive reader by a disingenuous and a false implication.

You set out with this position: "That the supreme power of every community has the right of requiring from all its subjects such contributions as are necessary to the publick safety or publick prosperity."

You pretend that this position is as old as Government, but it is evidently of modern structure. This appears from the word requiring. Your maxim is, not that the supreme power has the right of taxing, but of requiring contributions from all its subjects, and is evidently framed for the present dispute, and for the identical idea of requisition from the Colonies. Now this, whether right or wrong, is certainly not an old, nor even now an established idea on either side of the Atlantic.

Further, if by the supreme power having a right to require contributions, you mean that it has a right to tax, you express yourself inaccurately; and if, from that position, you conclude that the British Parliament has a right to tax America, you but just assume what you ought to prove. For the very point in debate is, whether the British Parliament, though it be the supreme power of the whole Empire as to many points, is so as to all, and particularly as to taxation. Now this being a question relating to the British Government, it is evident that it is not to be determined by a general maxim of Government in abstract. It must be decided by the fundamental principles of the British Constitution; by the established practice of it, and by the dictates of sound sense, of natural justice, and of publick convenience, applied to the ground of that Constitution.

By your general terms, the reader naturally supposes it only to be asserted that the Legislature of every community has the power you speak of. Now this, in abstract, sounds well. When we speak of the Legislature of a community, we suppose only one Legislature: and where there is but one, it must of necessity have the right you speak of; otherwise, no taxes at all could be raised in that community. But then the proof arises from this necessity, which makes it absurd that it should be otherwise. Where, therefore, there is not the same necessity, the same absurdity will not arise, nor the same proof, by consequence, follow. Now the present dispute is not with respect to this Island alone, which certainly has but one Legislature, but with respect to the British Empire at large, in which there are many Legislatures; or many Assemblies claiming to be so. Here is the fallacy of your position. From the state of the British Empire, composed of extensive and dispersed Dominions, and from the nature of its Government, a multiplicity of Legislatures, or of Assemblies claiming to be so, have arisen in one Empire. It is in some degree a new case in legislation, and must be governed therefore more by its own circumstances, and by the genius of our peculiar Constitution, than by abstract notions of Government at large. Every Colony, in fact, has two Legislatures, one interiour and Provincial, viz: the Colony Assembly; the other exteriour and imperial, viz: the British Parliament. It would have been utterly absurd, that a Provincial Legislature should ever have subsisted, if it were not practically or constitutionally necessary for certain matters. It would be equally absurd if the imperial Legislature were to interpose in such matters; for if it should, one of two things must follow; either that the imperial Legislature must, in such matters, yield to the Provincial wherever they differed; or that it must prevail over it in points, from its own practical or constitutional unfitness for which, the Provincial Legislature was formed; either of which would be perfectly absurd. Neither will the unity of the Empire be in danger from the Provincial Legislature being thus exclusive as to points. It is perfectly sufficient, if the British Legislature be supreme as to all those things which are essential to Great Britain's being substantially the head of the Empire; a line not very difficult to be drawn, if it were the present subject. Neither is there any absurdity in there being two Assemblies, each of them sufficient, or, if you will, supreme, as to objects perfectly distinct; for this plain reason, that the objects being perfectly distinct, they cannot clash. The Colonist, therefore, allowing that the supreme power or

*This Pamphlet is one of those masterly productions of the Press which seldom appear but on great occasions. It is wished that it may be universally read before the measures of Government are carried to the extreme.—Gent. Mag.