force the Americans to this point; they even continued to petition parliament until 1774; but after that time they were no further inconsistent, and held that the king was the only bond of union between the parts of the empire. When he wanted money from his American dominions, he was to get it, as he had always got it, by applying to the assembly of the colony, through the governor, for a grant. In the new seats of the race, as in the old, an Englishman was to be taxed only by his own representatives. In other words, each of the English colonies claimed, in its own field and for its own citizens, the exact principles of “English liberty” which had been established in England as the relations of the English subject to the crown. Each colony was to be governed by its own laws, just as in Jersey and Guernsey, in Scotland before the Union, or in Hanover in 1763, with appeal to the king in council, not to English courts or to the House of Lords. For the British parliament, or still more the British citizen, to talk of “our sovereignty” over the colonies was a derogation from the king's sovereignty, the only sovereignty which the colonies knew. “I am quite sick of our sovereignty,” wrote Franklin in 1769. The case of the colonies was evidently that of Ireland also; and Franklin notes the fact that several members of colonial assemblies had been admitted to the privileges of the Irish parliament, on the ground that they were members of “American parliaments.” To this statement of their case the Americans adhered with progressive closeness from 1763 until the end. In their final Declaration of Independence it will be found that it is a declaration of their independence of the king only; they do not then admit that the British parliament had ever had any authority over them; and that body is only mentioned in one place, in one of the counts of the indictment of the king, for having given his assent to certain “acts of pretended legislation,” passed by “a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws,” that is to say, by the British parliament.
Possible compromises.41. Two irreconcilable theories were thus presented. Between them were two courses, either of which the colonies were willing to accept. Under their theory there was no “imperial parliament.” They were willing to have one constituted, even if it were only a development of the British parliament through admission of colonial representatives; but the time for this passed before the parties could debate it. On the other hand, the colonies were willing to abandon to the wealthier British parliament, which sustained so much larger a proportion of the cost of the standing army and navy, the privilege of regulating external trade for the general good. So late as 1774 the Continental Congress, while maintaining the sole right of the colonial assemblies to levy internal taxation and make local laws, declared their willingness to yield to the British parliament the power to make such regulations of external trade as were bona fide meant to benefit trade, and not to raise a revenue from Americans without their own consent. This solution could have been only temporary at best, and war cut off any discussion of it.
42. The work of quiet revolution was begun in March 1763, in the closing hours of the Bute ministry, Charles Townshend being first lord of trade and administrator of the colonies. It was decided to make a point of having all the American judges and other officials hold office during the king's pleasure, and to make their salaries independent of the colonial assemblies. The army estimates were increased by an American standing force of twenty regiments, to be paid for by Great Britain for the first year, and thereafter out of a revenue to be raised in America by Act of Parliament. Bute's purposes were political,—the diminution of democracy in America. The Wilkes uproar drove him out of power before he could develop his plans; but his successor, Grenville, followed The Stamp Act. them out for financial reasons, and in February 1765 the Stamp Act “was passed through both Houses with less opposition than a turnpike bill.”
The Navigation Laws.43. For the past two years the colonists had had other things to think of. Under Grenville the Acts in restraint of colonial trade (§§ 20, 21), which had been allowed to become practically obsolete, were put into force with unsparing rigour. The numbers of the customs officers were increased; their duties were more plainly declared; naval officers were encouraged to take the oaths of customs officers and share in the plunder of the commerce which had grown up between America and the West Indian Islands and other parts of the world. Search was constant; confiscation usually followed search; and appeal was even more costly than confiscation. In the confusion arising from the efforts of American commerce to escape its new enemies, it was not wonderful that other questions were allowed to go by default. But the mutterings of resistance were heard. The Massachusetts assembly protested against any schemes to create a standing army in America, to make officers independent of the assemblies, or to raise a revenue without consent of the assemblies, and appointed a committee to secure the united action of all the colonies. This was the first movement in the struggle for union. Its importance was hidden from the ministry by the official class in the colonies, whose members—the governors, judges, and other crown officials—continued to urge a persistence in the new policy, and to represent the Adamses, Otis, and the other colonial leaders as animated by a perverse desire to destroy the unity of the empire.
44. The revenue to be raised by the Stamp Act was to come from the sale of stamps and stamped paper for marriage licences, commercial transactions, suits at law, transfers of real estate, inheritances, publications, and some minor sources of revenue. With it was another startling provision, a command to the colonial assemblies to furnish the royal troops in America with fuel, candles, vinegar, bedding, cooking utensils, and potables, and permission to billet the troops in inns, alehouses, barns, and vacant houses. The colonies were thus to be taxed without their consent; the revenue derived therefrom was to be devoted to the support of a standing army; and that army was in turn to be used for the maintenance of the scheme of taxation. Yet no one in England seems to have dreamed of American resistance to it; and Grenville was able to say in 1770 that he “did not foresee the opposition to the measure, and would have staked his life for obedience.”
Resistance to the Stamp Act.45. The news of the passage of the Stamp Act caused all America to hum with the signs of resistance, but forcible resistance was at first repudiated everywhere, it took the shape, really more significant, of declarations by the colonial assemblies, the lower or popular houses of the legislatures. The Virginia assembly, under the lead of Patrick Henry and the younger members, took the first step (May 1765), by a declaration of colonial rights covering the right of each colony to make its own laws and impose and expend its own taxation. The Massachusetts assembly followed with the formal proposal of an American Congress, to be composed of representatives of all the colonies. South Carolina seconded the call; and the first step on the road to union was taken.
46. Outside of these formal steps there were signs of a less formal popular resistance. Even peaceable resistance was pro tanto a suspension of royal and parliamentary authority in the colonies; and it was probably inevitable that the colonial assemblies should succeed to the power
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