the progress of population in America. But it is easy to conceive that the bold adventurers, who first spread their colonies over a surface of the globe, so distant, so obscure, so desolate, were not induced into the enterprize, for institutions less liberal, a government less free, or privileges less sacred, than those they aspired to, or abandoned in their native country. As a prelude to their emigration, charters were, therefore, required of the king, in which not only was the secure possession of the soil conveyed to themselves, their heirs and successors forever, but the frame and powers of government, and mode of administration were defined, and all those principles of liberty, deemed most essential in the British constitution, explicitly recognised.

These charters, though granted to communities distinct and independent of each other, were, nevertheless, substantially the same; and their political institutions bore to those of England as near a conformity as the nature of a colonial government could admit. To a president or governor, who held his office at the discretion of the king, was delegated all the executive, judicial, and military authority residing in the crown. The governor, his assistants, with the representatives of the freemen, composed the legislative council, and were invested with all the powers of legislation inherent in the parliament, re

strained only from such acts as were repugnant to the laws and constitution of England.

The settlements of New England were originally undertaken at a time of faction and turbulence, without a premeditated plan of colonization, and were exempt from the interposition, care and cognizance of the mother country. During this salutary neglect, absolved from external subjection, and profiting by the immunities of their invisibility they had not only established in their different communities independent sovereign republics, but had acquired those habits of independence, and imbibed that inextinguishable spirit of freedom, which afterwards the interposing power of Great Britain was unable to mitigate or control. All officers, civil and military, were chosen by the suffrage of the inhabitants. The executive power was vested in a governor, deputy and assistants, the legislative in a general court, composed of the above and the freemen of the commonwealth.

This country, which had been acquired by the labour, lives, and fortunes of these adventurers, was afterwards, by their prince, distributed among his favourites, or sold to companies and individuals who had contributed nothing to the foundation of it. The form of government already established was, however, by their original charters, permitted to subsist;

and Connecticut, by a pertinacious defence of her privileges, and by favoring heaven, retained her free institutions down to the period of her independence. The haughty and high-spirited republicans of Massachusetts yielded, in 1692, with a reluctant and indignant submission, the choice of their governor to the crown. But they asserted and maintained with so great obstinacy the influence of their colonial legislature that they circumscribed this authority of the king, and rendered it, in some degree, impotent and innoxious to the liberties of the province.

Such, in their original establishments, were the political institutions of the colonists and their primitive relations with the mother country. They had migrated to America with all the attributes of freemen, and under the sanction of that eternal privilege which nature has impartially conferred upon the human race. They departed, because their happiness required it, from the land in which accident and not choice had determined their birth. They sought a habitation in America, as their Saxon ancestors in the island of Britain, and like them were absolved, by the principles of natural justice, from all claims of dependance or superiority asserted over them by that country from which they had migrated. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement

effectual; "for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they had a right to hold their dominions." But a portion of this natural sovereignty they had, from ignorance, improvidence, or convenience, surrendered to the feudal pretensions of the English monarchy, retaining, however, those rights which were inherent in them, as citizens of the British empire in Europe.

Charles the first, who ruled his native kingdom with the violence of a despot, extended also the arm of tyranny to his foreign dominions. Without regard to the natural rights of the colonists or the privileges of their charters, he had conceived, in the mad assumption of his regal prerogatives, that these distant countries were to be governed as provinces under absolute subjection to the crown. He made laws, ordinances, constitutions, without their participation. He appointed royal commissioners who were erected into a council for the plantations, and a supreme court of appeal for the colonial governments, to enforce obedience to his arbitrary decrees. This commission was annulled at the death of that profligate monarch, but the same system of violence descended to his successors. It was exercised with lenity, during the commonwealth, and resumed, at the restoration, with all the rage and insolence of tyranny.

After the revolution, when the principles of liberty were better understood and defined, this assumption of authority by the king and his privy council to make laws for British subjects, even in America, was urged with diffidence, or disguised in more cautious and insidious formalities. The same unconstitutional power was afterwards delegated, on various occasions, to the provincial governors, and a clause was uniformly annexed to their commissions, asserting the unlimited authority of the crown.

These acts of usurpation first devised by the king in his individual capacity, and afterwards exerted by the commonwealth without the intervention of royalty, were consummated at the reestablishment of the monarchy by the collective sovereignty of king, lords, and commons.

All communication of the royal power with the other branches of the legislature was repugnant to the charters and allegiance of the colonies; but, being admitted, necessarily established a new connexion of rights and obligations. From that moment the American people were no longer a distinct but a coherent and indivisible part of the British empire; and not having forfeited, by the act of migration, their constitutional liberties, were entitled to a participation in the legislative authority destined to govern them. Since, by the very spirit of that constitution to which the parliament itself owed its existence,