rushed towards a solution of the accumulated difficulties in the administration of the colonies.

1749.

The board of trade, so soon as Halifax had become its head, revived and earnestly promoted the scheme of strengthening the authority of the prerogative by a general act of the British parliament. At its instance, on the third day of March, 1749, under the pretext of suppressing the flagrant evils of colonial paper money, the disappointed Horatio Walpole, who for nearly thirty years had vainly struggled, as auditor-general of the colonies, to gain a sinecure allowance of five per cent on all colonial revenues, reported a bill to overrule charters, and to make all orders by the king, or under his authority, the highest law of America. In the reign of Henry VIII., parliament sanctioned "what a king, by his royal power, might do;" and gave the energy of law to his proclamations and ordinances. In this it did but surrender the liberties of its own constituents: Halifax and his board invited the British parliament to sequester the liberties of other communities, and transfer them to the British crown.

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The people of Connecticut, through their agent, Eliakim Palmer, protested against "the unusual and extraordinary" attempt, "so repugnant to the laws and constitution of Great Britain, and to their own "inestimable privileges and charter, "of being governed by laws of their own making." By their birthright, by the perils of their ancestors, by the sanctity of royal faith, by their own affectionate duty and zeal, by their devotion of their lives and fortunes to their king and country, they remonstrated against the bill. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island pleaded their patents, and reminded parliament of the tribute already levied on them by the monopoly of their commerce. For Massachusetts, William Bollan, through "the very good-natured Lord Baltimore," represented that the bill virtually included all future orders of all future princes, however repugnant they might be to the constitution of Great Britain, or of the colonies; thus abrogating for the people of Massachusetts their common rights as Englishmen, not less than their charter privileges. The agent of South Carolina cautiously

intimated that, as obedience to instructions was already due from the governors, whose commissions depended on the royal pleasure, the deliberative rights of the assemblies were the only colonial safeguard against unlimited authority.

"Venerating the British constitution, as established at the revolution," Onslow, the speaker of the house of commons, believed that parliament had power to tax America, but not to delegate that power; and, by his order, the objections to the proposed measure were spread at length on the journal. The board of trade wavered, and in April consented, reluctantly, "to drop for the present, and reserve," the despotic clauses; but it continued to cherish the spirit that dictated them, till it had itself ceased to exist.

At the same time Massachusetts was removing every motive to interfere with its currency by abolishing its paper money. That province had demanded, as a right, the reimbursement of its expenses for the capture of Louisburg. Its claim, as of right, was denied; for its people, it was said, were the subjects, and not the allies, of England; but the requisite appropriation was made by the equity of parliament. Massachusetts had already, in January, 1749, by the urgency of Hutchinson, voted that its public notes should be redeemed with the expected remittances from the royal exchequer. Twice in the preceding year, it had invited a convention of the neighboring colonies, to suppress jointly the fatal paper currency; but, finding concert impossible, it proceeded alone. As the bills had depreciated, and were no longer in the hands of the first holders, it was insisted that to redeem them at their original value would impose a new tax on the first holders themselves; and therefore forty-five shillings of the old tenor, or eleven shillings and threepence of the new emission, were, with the approbation of the king in council, redeemed by a Spanish milled dollar. Thus Massachusetts became the hard-money colony" of the north.

The plan for enforcing all royal orders in America by the act of the British parliament had hardly been abandoned, when the loyalty and vigilance of Massachusetts were perverted to further the intrigues against its liberty. In April,

1749, its assembly, which held that Nova Scotia included all the continent east of New England, represented to the king "the insolent intrusions" of France on their territory, ad-. vised that "the neighboring provinces should be informed of the common danger," and begged "that no breach might be made in any of the territories of the crown on the" American "continent." It was on occasion of transmitting this address that Shirley developed his system. To the Duke of Bedford he recommended the erecting and garrisoning of frontier "fortresses, under the direction of the king's engineers and officers." "A tax for their maintenance," he urged, "should be laid by parliament upon the colonies, without which it will not be done;" from the prosperous condition of America, he argued that "making the British subjects on this continent contribute towards their common security could not be thought laying a burden;" and he cited the acts of trade, and the duty laid on foreign sugars imported into the northern colonies, as precedents that established the reasonableness of his proposal.

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Shirley's associates in New York were equally persevering. The seventh day of May, 1749, brought to them "the agreeable news that all went flowingly on" as they had desired. Knowing that Bedford, Dorset, and Halifax had espoused their cause, they convened the legislature; but it was in vain. "The faithful representatives of the people," thus spoke the assembly of New York in July, “can never recede from the method of an annual support.' "I know well," rejoined the governor, "the present sentiments of his majesty's ministers; and you might have guessed at them by the bill lately brought into parliament for enforcing the king's instructions. Consider," he adds, "the great liberties you are indulged with. Consider, likewise, what may be the consequences, should our mother country suspect that you design to lessen the prerogative of the crown in the plantations. The Romans did not allow the same privileges to their colonies, which the other citizens enjoyed; and you know in what manner the republic of Holland governs her colonies. Endeavor, then, to show your great thankfulness for the great privileges you enjoy."

The representatives adhered unanimously to their resolutions, pleading that "governors are generally entire strangers to the people they are sent to govern; . . . they seldom regard the welfare of the people, otherwise than as they can make it subservient to their own particular interest; and, as they know the time of their continuance in their governments to be uncertain, all methods are used, and all engines set to work, to raise estates to themselves. Should the public moneys be left to their disposition, what can be expected but the grossest misapplication, under various pretences, which will never be wanting?" To this unanimity the governor could only oppose his determination of "most earnestly" invoking the attention of the ministry and the king to "their proceedings;" and then prorogued the assembly, which he afterwards dissolved.

To make the appeal to the ministry more effective, Shirley, who had obtained leave to go to England, and whose success in every point was believed to be most certain, before embarking received from Colden an elaborate argument, in which revenue to the crown, independent of the American people, was urged as indispensable; and, to obtain it, "the most prudent method," it was insisted, "would be by application to parliament."

But, before Shirley arrived in Europe, the ministry was already won to his designs. On the first day of June, the board of trade had been recruited by a young man gifted with "a thousand talents," the daring and indefatigable Charles Townshend. A younger son of Lord Townshend, ambitious, capable of unwearied labor, bold, and somewhat extravagant in his style of eloquence, yet surpassed as a debater only by Murray and Pitt, he was introduced to office through the commission for the colonies. His extraordinary and restless ability rapidly obtained sway at the board; Halifax cherished him as a favorite; and the parliament very soon looked up to him as "the greatest master of American affairs."

How to regulate charters and colonial governments, and provide an American civil list independent of American legislatures, was the earliest as well as the latest political

problem which Charles Townshend attempted to solve. At that time, Murray, as crown lawyer, ruled the cabinet on questions of legal right; Dorset, the father of Lord George Germain, was president of the council; Lyttelton and George Grenville were already of the treasury board; and Sandwich, raised by his hold on the affections of the Duke of Bedford, presided at the admiralty; Halifax, Charles Townshend, and their colleagues, were busy with remodelling American constitutions; while Bedford, the head of the new party that was in a few years to drive the more liberal branch of the whig aristocracy from power, as secretary of state for the southern department, was the organ of communication between the board of trade and the

crown.

These are the men who proposed to reconcile the discrepancy between the legal pretensions of the metropolis and the actual condition of the colonies. In vain did they resolve to shape America at will, and fashion it into new modes of being. The infant republics were not like blocks of marble from the quarry, which the artist may group by his design, and gradually transform by the chisel from shapeless masses to the images of his fancy; they resembled living plants, whose inward energies obey the divine idea without effort or consciousness of will, and unfold simultaneously their whole existence and the rudiments of all their parts, harmonious, beautiful, and complete in every period of their growth.

These British American colonies were the best trophy of modern civilization; on them, for the next forty years, rests the chief interest in the history of man.