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In matters of religion, intellectual freedom was viewed, in the colonies as in England, as a Protestant question; and the outcry against "Popery and slavery" generated equally bitter hostility towards the Roman Catholic Church. England, moreover, cherished a steady purpose of disseminating episcopacy; yet the political effect of this endeavour was inconsiderable. Similarity in religious institutions would, it is true, nurse a sympathy with England; but in South Carolina, in Maryland, laymen aspired to dominion over the church. American episcopacy, without an American bishop, was a solecism; and an American bishop was feared as an emblem of independence. Besides, if the advowson of the churches was reserved to the governor, the people took no interest in them; and religion can be propagated only by consent. If, on the contrary, the advowson remained with the parish, the church became popular, and inclined to independence. If, as in Virginia, the relations between priest and people were not accurately defined; if, among the missionaries, some, of feeble minds and uncertain morals, prodigious zealots from covetousness, sought, by appeals to England, to clutch at a monopoly of ecclesiastical gains; if legal questions arose,-the institution became the theme of dispute, and an instrument for educating the people into strife with their English superiors. The crown incorporated and favoured the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

The security of personal freedom was not formally

denied to America. Massachusetts, in an enactment, 1692. claimed the full benefit of the writ of habeas corpus : "the privilege had not yet been granted to the plantations," was the reply even of Lord Somers; it was not become a vested right; and the act was disallowed. When, afterwards, the privilege was affirmed by Queen Anne, the burgesses of Virginia, in their gratitude, did but esteem it "an assertion to her subjects of their just rights and properties." England conceded the security of personal freedom as a boon; America claimed it as a birthright.

In the contests respecting the judiciary, the crown gained the advantage. New England had not permitted appeals to the king in council; the permission of appeal was insisted upon in all the colonies. Thus, in the settlement of American disputes, the ultimate tribunal was in

England; and the English crown gained the appointment of the judges in nearly every colony. Where the people selected them, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, they were chosen annually, and the public preference, free from fickleness, gave stability to the office; where the appointment rested with the royal governor, the popular instinct desired for the judges an independent tenure.

To "make most of the money centre in England," the lords of trade proposed a regulation of the colonial currency, by reducing all the coin of America to one standard. The proclamation of Queen Anne was not designed to preserve among the colonies the English basis; on the contrary, it confirmed to all the colonies a depreciated currency, but endeavoured to make the depreciation uniform and safe against change. In a word, England sought to establish for itself a fixed standard of gold and silver; for the colonies, a fixed standard of depreciation. As the necessities of the colonies had led them of themselves to depreciate their currency, the first object of England was gained, and it therefore monopolized all gold and silver. Even the shillings of early coinage in Massachusetts were nearly all gathered up, and remitted; but the equality of depreciation could never be maintained against the rival cupidity of the competitors in bills of credit.

The enforcement of the mercantile system, in its intensest form, is also a characteristic of the policy of the aristocratic revolution of England. By the corn-laws, English agriculture became an associate in the system of artificial legislation. "The value of lands" began to be

urged as a motive for oppressing the colonies. The 1696. affairs of the plantations were, in 1696, intrusted permanently to the commissioners who formed the Board of Trade; and all questions on colonial liberty and affairs were decided from the point of view of English commerce.

All former acts giving a monopoly of the colonial trade to England were renewed, and, to effect their rigid execution, the paramount authority of parliament was strictly asserted. Colonial commerce could be conducted only in ships built, owned, and commanded by the people of England or of the colonies. All governors, in the charter colonies, as well as the royal provinces, were compelled to take oath to do their utmost that every clause in these acts be punctually observed. Officers of the revenue in

America were invested with all the powers conferred by act of parliament on those in England. The intercolonial trade had been burdened with taxation, and the payment of the tax was interpreted as giving to the goods the right of being exported anywhere: this liberty was denied. The immense American domain was reserved exclusively for English subjects, or for those who obtained from the privy council a permission to purchase. The proprietary charters were modified-it is the first act of parliament of that nature-by conferring on the crown a negative on the choice of the governors in the charter colonies; and the paramount legislative authority of parliament was asserted by declaring illegal, null, and void, every colonial act or usage, present or future, which might be in anywise repugnant "to this present act, or to any other law hereafter to be made in the kingdom, so far as such law shall relate to the plantations." Such was the spirit of English legislation for its colonies, at the great moment when England asserted its aristocratic liberties.

As yet the owners of land were not sufficiently pledged to the colonial system. Wool was the great staple of England, and its growers and manufacturers envied the colonies the possession of a flock of sheep, a spindle, or a loom. The preamble to an act of parliament avows the motive for a restraining law, in the conviction that colonial industry would " inevitably sink the value of lands" in England. The public mind of the mother country could esteem the present interest of its landholders paramount to natural justice. The clause, which I am about to cite, is a memorial of a delusion which once pervaded all Western Europe, and which has already so passed away, that men grow incredulous of its former existence :

"After the first day of December, 1699, no wool, or manufacture made or mixed with wool, being the produce or manufacture of any of the English plantations in America, shall be loaden in any ship or vessel, upon any pretence whatsoever,—nor loaden upon any horse, cart, or other carriage,—to be carried out of the English plantations to any other of the said plantations, or to any other place whatsoever." Thus, the fabrics of Connecticut might not seek a market in Massachusetts, or be carried to Albany to traffic with the Indians. An English mariner might not purchase in Boston woollens of a greater

value than forty shillings. The mercantile system of England, in its relations with foreign states, sought a convenient tariff; in the colonies, it prohibited industry!

And the intolerable injustice was not perceived. The interests of the landed proprietors with the monopolies of commerce and manufactures, jointly fostered by artificial legislation, corrupted the public judgment, so that there was no secret compunction. Even the bounty on naval stores was not intended as a compensation, but grew out of the efforts of Sweden to infringe the mercantile system of England, and was accompanied by a proviso which extended the jurisdiction of parliament to every grove north of the Delaware. Every pitch-pine tree, not in an enclosure, was henceforward sacred to the purposes of the English navy; and, in the undivided domain, no tree fit for a mast might be cut without the queen's license. Thus the bounty of the English parliament was blended with monopoly, while the colonists were constantly invited to cease the manufacture of wool, and produce naval stores.

In Virginia, the poverty of the people compelled them to attempt coarse manufactures, or to go unclad! yet Nicholson, the royal governor, calmly advised that parliament should forbid the Virginians to make their own clothing. Spotswood repeats the complaint: "The people, more of necessity than of inclination, attempt to clothe themselves with their own manufactures;" adding, that "it is certainly necessary to divert their application to some commodity less prejudicial to the trade of Great

Britain." The charter colonies are reproached by 1701. the lords of trade, "with promoting and propagating woollen and other manufactures proper to England." The English need not fear to conquer Canada ;-such was the reasoning of an American agent ;-for, in Canada, "where the cold is extreme, and snow lies so long on the ground, sheep will never thrive so as to make the woollen manufactures possible, which is the only thing that can make a plantation unprofitable to the crown." The policy was continued by every administration. 66 Should our sovereign authority of legislative and commercial control be denied,' said the elder Pitt, seventy years afterwards, "I would not suffer even a nail for a horse-shoe to be manufactured in America ;" and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the lords of trade and plantations, to effect their purposes of monopoly, proposed that every charter should,

by the legislative power of the kingdom, be reassumed to the crown.

The charters were royal grants, and a parliament which had disfranchised a dynasty disdained to consider their violation a just ground for resistance. It placed its own power alike above the authority by which they had been conceded, and above the colonies which possessed them. From legislating on commerce and industry, it proceeded to legislate on government; and, if it omitted to startle the colonies by the avowal, it plainly held the maxim as indisputable, that it might legislate for them in all cases whatsoever.

These relations, placing the property, the personal freedom, the industry, the chartered liberties of the colonies, in the goodwill, and under "the absolute power," of the English legislature, could not but lead to independence; and the English were the first to perceive the tendency.

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The insurrection in New England, in 1689, excited alarm, as an indication of a daring spirit. In 1701, the lords of trade, in a public document, declared "the independency the colonies thirst after is now notorious."*Commonwealth notions improve daily," wrote Quarry, in 1703; and, if it be not checked in time, the rights and privileges of English subjects will be thought too narrow." In 1705, it was said in print, "The colonists will, in process of time, cast off their allegiance to England, and set up a government of their own;" and by degrees it came to be said, "by people of all conditions and qualities, that their increasing numbers and wealth, joined to their great distance from Britain, would give them an opportunity, in the course of some years, to throw off their dependence on the nation, and declare themselves a free state, if not curbed in time, by being made entirely subject to the crown." "Some great men professed their belief of the feasibleness of it, and the probability of its some time or other actually coming to pass."

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