: revenue. The act indeed provided, that after all fuch minifterial warrants under the fign manual as are thought proper and necessary shall be fatisfied, the refidue of the revenue shall be at the difpofal of Parliament. "But who, it was afked, can suppose such warrants will ever be fatisfied till Minifters have provided for all their friends and favorites? This mockery of an American revenue proves at last, said a Member of the House (Mr. Hartley), to be only the crumbs that fall from the Minifter's table-the RESIDUE of a royal warrant countersigned by the First Lord of the Treasury!" The next step in the progress of the new system of American taxation was the establishment of an American Board of Commiffioners, which, under the aufpices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Charles Townshend, passed into an act the fame feffion. This Board was fixed at Boston, -where the Commissioners arrived in the autumn of that year. The non-importation agreement entered into by the Colonies, in consequence of the rash and unsadvifed measures adopted by England, have been ralready noticed; but though they confined their practical oppofition to their commercial combinations, they now began to indulge a boundless and dangerous license of speculative difcuffion on the nature and extent of parliamentary power. Till this period they had, with a cheerfulness which precluded cluded any deep or accurate investigation of right, admitted the exercise of a difcretionary legislative authority in the Parliament of Great Britain. They had admitted the distinction between raising money as the mere incidental produce of regulating duties, and for the direct purpose of revenue; but now they argued more boldly, and as speculatifts more confiftently, in saying, that if the Parliament of Great Britain has no right to tax us internally, they have none to tax us externally; and if they have no right to tax us without our confent, they can have none to govern or to legislate for us without our consent. These reasonings, so natural and obvious in present circumstances, when the power of the Mother Country was, in the apprehenfion of every American, employed to the purposes of oppreffion, prove in a striking manner the unexampled folly of Great Britain, in risquing the difcuffion of a right so problematic and precarious. The only just and solid basis of the authority of Great Britain over the Colonies, was that of common utility sanctioned by long prescription and universal acquiefcence. But when the authority of Great Britain was exerted for her own feparate advantage, in a manner unauthorized by custom, and unacknowledged by those over whom it was exercised by mere dint of fuperior force, it could in nothing be diftinguished from tyranny, to which resistance and revolt only can be properly opposed, To attempt to govern a whole nation in a mode abhorrent from their feelings, principles, and prejudices, is a complication of folly and wickedness; and the counsels of Great Britain at this period were governed by a fpirit of infatuation, which it is difficult to analyse into any of the common principles of human action, and which excites our aftonishment at least as strongly as our indignation or regret. In January 1768, the Assembly of Massachusetts Bay tranfinitted, by their Speaker, a circular letter to the different Colonies, in which they recommend to the respective Colonial Legislatures to take into joint confideration the measures it may be proper to adopt for the redress of their common grievances, particularly specifying the late acts imposing duties and taxes on America, and expreffing their firm confidence in the King, their common head and father, that the united and dutiful fupplications of his distreffed American subjects will meet with his royal and favorable acceptance. No fooner was this known in England, than Lord Hillsborough tranfmitted instructions to Governor Bernard, in his Majesty's name, so soon as the General Court was again affembled, to require of the House of Representatives " to RESCIND the resolution which gave birth to the circular letter from the Speaker, and to declare their disapprobation of, and diffent from, that rash and hasty proceeding-at the fame time strangely affirming the resolution in question to be unfair, contrary to the real sense of the Afsembly, and procured by surprise;" although it in fact passed almost unanimously in a very full House, after the most ample and deliberate discussion. In case of the refufsal of the House to comply with this requifition, the Governor was commanded immediately to dissolve the Assembly, and to tranfinit to his Lordship an account of their transactions. This imperious demand was conceived precisely in the spirit of a mandate of the French King to his Parliaments, but fortunately it could not be enforced by lettres de cachet. If French Parliaments have been known resolutely to resist the will of the defpot with the terrors of imprisonment, exile, and death before their eyes, it will easily be supposed that an assembly of men boasting their defcent from ancestors whose garments were stained in the blood of tyrants, were little likely to yield this abject fubmiffion. A Committee of the House reported a letter to Lord Hillsborough, in which the egregious misapprehenfion of his Lordship, with regard to the mode in which the resolution had passed the House, was corrected, and the House then agreed on a message to the Governor, in which they faid-" It is to us incomprehenfible that we should be required, on the peril of a diffolution of the General Court, to refcind a resolution of a former House, when it is evident that that refolution resolution has no existence, but as a mere historical fact. Your Excellency must know that the refolution is, to fpeak the language of the common law, not now executory, but to all intents and purposes executed. If, as is most probable, by the word refcinding is intended the paffing a vote in direct and exprefs disapprobation of the measure of the former House, we must take the liberty to tef tify, and publicly to declare, that we take it to be the native, inherent, and indefeasible right of the subject jointly or feverally to petition the King for the redress of grievances. If the votes of the House are to be controlled by the direction of a Minister, we have left us but a vain semblance of liberty. We have now only to inform you, that this House have voted NOT to RESCIND'; and that, on the division on the question, there were ninety-two yeas, and seventeen nays." The next day the Governor diffolved the Affembly. In the course of the debate which preceded this resolution, a Member of the Affembly faid, "When Lord Hillsborough knows that we will not rescind our acts, he should apply to Parliament to refcind theirs. Let Britain refcind her measures, or the will lofe America for ever." At the fame time that Lord Hillsborough tranf mitted his Majesty's high commands to Sir Francis Bernard, he wrote a circular letter to the Governors of the different Provinces, in which, referring to |