coaxed, frightened, or forced into a recognition of this monstrous power, American liberty would have been gone forever. The wise and the virtuous saw this, but their line of conduct was the cold line of prudence. The times required a more spirited procedure. But men’s minds were forming for something future. The period is now arrived. While our chair, as to the purposes of doing good, was filled with a mere machine, wheeled about by Ministerial agency, whose hands were tied up and formed for mischief by sought-for instructions, the people were sinking under the capricious weight of the same authority. While our Board had become the simple skeletons of power, without nerves or sinews, and, in some of its hebdomadal sessions, tools to the duped, our House was a well formed mass of matter, with feverish pulses, but without real strength or energy. It was wearied, dragooned, dogged, and harassed into unworthy compliances. I do not mention it as matter of blame, but a subject of pity. It struggled to the utmost; what could it do? Its greatest merit was to bear gracefully; its greatest strength, to lay still. Our misfortune was the fault of the times, the temper of the day, the policy of the Continent. How could it be otherwise, when the spirit of the Continent could see, as it did see, the legislative authority of one Colony entirely suspended, and the Representatives of another drove, by the mouth of cannon and the points of bayonets, from their usual and legal place of residence, with as much insignificancy as a marching posse of regulars, with a corporal at their head, crosses a green? Thus the bare badge and semblance of a Governour, with all the pageantry of power, and a band of mercenaries at his heels, (those curses of the day, and scourges of mankind, ) bursted the sacred bands of society asunder, and dried up the sources of justice. This perversion of faith has been the arts of the little despots of the day. Instructions first wrote for, and then made the pretence for opposing every attempt in the Assembly for the good of their constituents. The interest of the Governour and that of the people consisting in opposite extremes, when, by a prostitution of the laws in being, he could not be the author of positive evil, he was a never failing obstruction to future good, by proscribing the advantages of new laws. Every discouragement, check, and restriction, was practised, to goad down our necks to a vile dependance. Hedged out from the advantages of Government, such a mockery from power, such a delusion of command, has heightened the colours of our slavery; such an insult upon our feelings has made servitude more servile. The American, generous and humane, has suffered his private virtue to betray him into a weakness in politicks. He too prone in excusing long the servants of the people, the first dawnings, and even repeated instances of tyranny, he imputes to any cause, rather than an oppressive design. But when he discovers a long premeditated plan; when he sees himself impoverished, plundered, robbed, and distressed, he be comes determined and daring, a tide of just indignation swells his veins, and neither the ornaments of power nor the trappings of state will sooth the fervour of his spirits. They may lift the culprit to higher view, and render his fall the more conspicuous. But to return to our history.

It was not enough to see our Representatives contemned, insulted, held in duresse, by a mere fang of power; not enough to be shut out from the advantages of enacting wholesome laws, and a printer who dared to publish the truth, marked out for destruction; not enough to see law, justice, and the principles of a free Constitution, set at defiance—but the very shadows of freedom must be puffed away by the contaminated breath of a Minister. Is it possible that a King of the Brunswick line should stoop from the dignity of his station to prescribe the form of a preamble to a Provincial law? That he should instruct the representative of his own virtues to assent to no law which contained in its purview words purporting the authority by which it was enacted? Is it possible that an assembly of freemen should submit to the wanton restriction, as it leads to servitude and all the absurdities of the Tresillian doctrine? I repeat it from memory, but for its confirmation appeal to the Records of the House—the Assembly strangely complied. Was there any occult meaning, any magick threatening the supremacy of Parliament, any treason, any thing that looked like riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, or combinations of a dangerous tendency, that these five words, “by authority of the same,” must be proscribed and forever struck out, shamefully banished the code of our Provincial laws? Was the very form of liberty so odious in the eyes of the “best of Princes,” that the most obsequious of his subjects could not be indulged with its mere shadow? I say shadow—I blush for my countrymen—I speak it with indignation, nothing else remained. I beg pardon for being ludicrous upon a subject so melancholy. I feel a sacred loyalty for Kings and the Representatives of Majesty, but the transaction merits consummate contempt.

Other badges, or rather effects of slavery, were the unconstitutional Board of Commissioners, and its twin sister, the Court of Admiralty. These two hopeful children of oppression have been constantly merchandising in cruelty, knavery, injustice, and bribery. However black these charges may seem, they can be proved by evidence and supported by arguments. The former of these monsters had a numerous offspring, without property or sentiment, of pimps, clerks, and tidewaiters, who rioted on the spoils of the people, living by plunder and peculation. The latter, rendered despicable to an odious degree by some extraordinary decisions, was well calculated to enslave and procure submissions, and, by its expansions; to be destructive of that jewel in the English Constitution, trial by juries.

The egregious violation of our charter, in the independency of our Governour, was completing the tragedy, and productive of the worst of evils. This opened new scenes. Unchecked, and without control from the governed, he assumed airs, prerogatives wantoned in all their licentious rigour, power grown rampant, opposition ineffectual, and every moving popular principle, except the tongues of the oppressed, was sealed in silence. The liberty of the press was basely, was infamously attacked by this dignified bribed oppressor—a privilege ever dear to Englishmen, as it is an engine fruitful of mighty events, in battering down the strong holds of the powerful. It should always be viewed with jealousy, and defended at every hazard. Tyrants have often felt its force, and wreaked their malice against it. Says the ingenious Hume, “It is sufficiently known that arbitrary power would steal in upon us, were we not extremely watchful to prevent its progress, and were there not an easy way of conveying the alarm from one end of the Kingdom to the other. The spirit of the people must frequently be roused, in order to curb the ambition of the Court, and the dread of that spirit’s being roused must be employed to prevent that ambition. Nothing so effectual to this purpose as the liberty of the press, by which all the learning, wit, and genius of the nation may be employed on the side of liberty, and every one be animated to its defence.” It is from the efficacy of this that our opposition is so respectable, our unanimity so ample. It is equally open to the Court and the Country, to the man in publick life, and the private speculator, who may have the world for his theatre, and the publick for the object of his beneficence, while buried in obscurity, and confined to the smoke of his own chimney. In this way, many have been the watchings in our day, long the lucubrations, great the toils, and constant the labours, of some obscure individuals, God knows, for the good of their Country. Yet very contracted must have been their sphere, and useless their private efforts, had they been confined to that narrow circle into which the lot of Providence had cast them. But this liberty of the press, which is of common right the palladium of freedom, important as it is, and useful as it must be, has been attacked with impunity by the sacrilegious hand of a pensioned Govemour.

I must reserve the remainder of this catalogue, which blackens the escutcheons of an Hutchinson, and gives him a plenitude of infamy, to some future number. I think this, at least, is very apparent from the adduced instances that if our disease was not slavery itself, it had most of its threatening symptoms, and was hastening fast to a crisis; if it Was not the worst we had to fear, it was what Denmark, France, and Spain, died of We are now in a fair way of recovery; let us not relapse by our own supineness, inattention, or cowardice.

Worcester, Massachusetts, November 10, 1775.