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course in favour of popular offenders. They should there fore not have been distrusted on this occasion. But that ill-fated Colony had formerly been bold in their enmities against the House of Stuart, and were now devoted to ruin by that unseen hand which governs the momentous affairs of this great Empire. On the partial representations of a few worthless Ministerial dependants, whose constant office it has been to keep that Government embroiled, and who, by their treacheries, hope to obtain the dignity of the British knighthood, without calling for the party accused, without asking a proof, without attempting a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, the whole of that ancient and wealthy town, is in a moment reduced from opulence to beggary. Men who had spent their lives in extending the British commerce, who had invested in that place the wealth their honest endeavours had merited, found themselves and their families thrown at once on the world for subsistence by its charities. Not the hundreth part of the inhabitants of that town had been concerned in the act complained of, many of them were in Great Britain and in other parts beyond sea; yet all were involved in one indiscriminate ruin, by a new Executive power unheard of till then, that of a British Parliament. A property, of a value of many millions of money, was sacrificed to revenge, not repay, the loss of a few thousands. This is administering justice with a heavy hand indeed! And when is this tempest to be arrested in its course? Two wharves are to be opened again when his Majesty shall think proper. The residue, which lined the extensive shores of the bay of Boston, are forever interdicted the exercise of commerce. This little exception seems to have been thrown in for no other purpose than that of setting a precedent for investing his Majesty with legislative powers. If the pulse of his people shall beat calmly under this experiment, another and another will be tried, till the measure of despotism be filled up. It would be an insult on common sense to pretend that this exception was made in order to restore its commerce to that great town. The trade which cannot be received at two wharves alone, must of necessity be transferred to some other; to which it will soon be followed by that of the two wharves. Considered in this light, it would be an insolent and cruel mockery at the annihilation of the town of Boston.
By the Act* for the suppression of riots and tumults in the town of Boston, passed also in the last session of Parliament, a murder committed there is, if the Governour pleases, to be tried in a Court of King's Bench, in the Island of Great Britain, by a jury of Middlesex. The witnesses too, on receipt of such a sum as the Governour shall think it reasonable for them to expend, are to enter into recognisance to appear at the trial. This is, in other words, taxing them to the amount of their recognisances, and that amount may be whatever a Governour pleases; for who does his Majesty think can be prevailed on to cross the Atlantic for the sole purpose of bearing evidence to a fact? His expenses are to be borne, indeed, as they shall be estimated by a Governour; but who are to feed the wife and children whom he leaves behind, and who have had no other subsistence but his daily labour? Those epidemical disorders too, so terrible in a foreign climate, is the cure of them to be estimated among the articles of expense, and their danger to be warded off by the almighty power of Parliament? And the wretched criminal, if he happened to have offended on the American side, stripped of his privilege of trial by peers of his vicinage, removed from the place where alone full evidence could be obtained, without money, without counsel, without friends, without exculpatory proof, is tried before judges predetermined to condemn. The cowards who would suffer a countryman to be torn from the bowels of their society, in order to be thus offered a sacrifice to Parliamentary tyranny, would merit that everlasting infamy now fixed on the authors of the Act! A clause† for a similar purpose had been introduced into an Act passed in the twelfth year of his Majesty's reign, entitled, "An Act for the better securing and preserving his Majesty's dockyards, magazines, ships, ammunition, and stores," against which, as meriting the same censures, the several Colonies have already pro tested.
That these are Acts of power, assumed by a body of men, foreign to our Constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws, against which we do, on behalf of the inhabitants of British America, enter this our solemn and determined Protest; and that we do earnestly entreat his Majesty, as yet the only mediatory power between the several states of the British Empire, to recommend to his Parliament of Great Britain the total revocation of those Acts, which however nugatory they may be, may yet prove the cause of further discontents and jealousies among us.
That we next proceed to consider the conduct of his Majesty as holding the Executive powers of the laws of these States; and mark out his deviations from the line of duty. By the Constitution of Great Britain, as well as the several American States, his Majesty possesses the power of refusing to pass into a law any Bill which has already passed the other two branches of Legislature. His Majesty, however, and his ancestors, conscious of the impropriety of opposing their single opinion to the united wisdom of the two Houses of Parliament, while their proceedings were unbiased by interested principles, for several ages past, have modestly declined the exercise of this power in that part of his Empire called Great Britain. But by change of circumstances other principles than those of justice simply, have obtained an influence on their determinations; the addition of new states to the British Empire has produced an addition of new, and sometimes, opposite interests. It is now, therefore, the great office of his Majesty to resume the exercise of his negative power, and to prevent the passing of laws by any one Legislature of the Empire, which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another. Yet this will not excuse the wanton exercise of this power, which we have seen his Majesty practice on the laws of the American Legislatures. For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestick slavery is the greatest 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 advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice. Nay, the single interposition of an interested individual, against a law, was scarcely ever known to fail of success, though in the opposite scale were placed the interests of a whole country. That this is so shameful an abuse of a power trusted with his Majesty for other purposes, as if not reformed, would call for some legal restrictions.
With equal inattention to the necessities of his people here, has his Majesty permitted our laws to lie neglected in England for years, neither confirming them by his as sent nor annulling them by his negative; so that such of them as have no suspending clause, we hold on the most precarious of all tenures, his Majesty's will, and such of them as suspend themselves till his Majesty's assent be obtained, we have feared might be called into existence at some future and distant period, when time and change of circumstances shall have rendered them destructive to his people here. And to render this grievance still more oppressive, his Majesty, by his instructions, have laid his Governours under such restrictions that they can pass no law of any moment, unless it have such suspending clause; so that, however immediate may be the call for Legislative interposition, the law cannot be executed till it has twice crossed the Atlantic, by which time the evil may have spent its whole force.
But in what terms, reconcileable to Majesty, and at the same time to truth, shall we speak of a late instruction to his Majesty's Governour of the Colony of Virginia, by which he is forbidden to assent to any law for the division of a county, unless the new county will consent to have no Representative in Assembly? That Colony has as yet fixed no boundary to the Westward. Their Western counties, therefore, are of indefinite extent, some of them are actually seated many hundred miles from their Eastern limits. Is it possible, then, that his Majesty can have bestowed a
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