number of years uniformly inactive. If the governor issued a proclamation there was hardly found a magistrate to obey it. The force of the civil power consisted of the posse comitatus, and the posse were the very people who have committed all these riots; and he goes on to lay down the principle on which hitherto the much-abused ministers had acted. "I shall always consider," he says (ibid., 1198), "that a military power, acting under the authority and control of a civil magistrate, is part of the constitution; but the military alone ought not and cannot act without the control of the civil magistrate." He proposes to give the governor the power of a J.P. and have power to appoint the civil authority. Governor Pownall relates that the military in the colony are under the command of the governor and the executive, and that he alone can order the military. He argues that he should have command of the forces and the forts. There had been, he says, misunderstandings between civil and military ever since the appointment of a commander-in-chief. The king should adjust the respective and military powers. As governor, he says, he would not have applied to the military he would have sent them an order. Governor Johnstone, however (ibid., 1188), prophesying rebellion, says, "In that country, sir, the governor is nothing more than a mere cypher: he has no support in any proposition he makes, no places to give away, and yet you blame him for not keeping up his authority." It was remarked that it was not surprising that the governor had no power when he had not a single place in his gift. It was urged on behalf of the colonies that the people of Ireland were much more virtually represented in Parliament than the colonies, in consequence of the great number of Englishmen possessed of estates and places of trust and profit in Ireland -a curious argument. A hopeless impasse had arisen which could only be settled by force.

iv. Colonial Governments and Taxation.-In laying new duties on imports, in proposing to extend the Stamp Act to the colonies, the British minister had done nothing new in principle. The forces which created discontent and the commercial relations both dated well back into the seventeenth century. Schemes had been going on from 1754 onwards for raising

a war revenue from the colonies. The governors had had orders to quarter troops on the colonists and to impress transport and provisions. The behaviour of the colonists in Pontiac's war in 1763 was quite sufficient to account for the proposal to support new regular troops by colonial taxes instead of risking the neglect or refusal of the colonial assemblies to raise proper levies. But in practice the Stamp Act made a change which gave an opening of immense importance to the demagogue.

The chief obstacle to any resistance by the colonies to charges proposed by the mother country lay in their isolation as among themselves. There was no common ground of unity in race or religion or political faith. They had not the same origin or the same forms of government, though each in part was moulded on the British model. There were king's provinces, in which the governor and high officials were appointed by the king; proprietary provinces such as Maryland, granted by Charles I. to Lord Baltimore in 1632, and Pennsylvania, in which the proprietors appointed the governor; and lastly, the Charter provinces such as Virginia, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Charters gave great powers of government to some of the colonies (see Governor Pownall's account of the Government of Massachusetts, P.H., Vol. XVII., 1199), leaving to them a far greater independence than that enjoyed by the colonies of other nations.

Their relations to taxation by the home government varied with their origin. When, after the civil war, Virginia, which had declared for the king, submitted to the English Parliament, the English Commissioners conceded her right to freedom "from all taxes, customs, and impositions whatever, not enforced by the General Assembly." When Franklin was under examination before the Committee of the House of Commons, it was pointed out to him that in the Pennsylvania Charter there was an express reservation of the right of the Crown to lay on taxes by Act of Parliament. But these express provisions of a generous Charter under which the colony had enjoyed great prosperity were pushed aside in true colonial fashion. Franklin's reply is that the colonists understand that they are entitled to all the privileges and liberties of Englishmen, and that by Magna Charta and the Petition of Right they were not to be taxed except with their own consent.

The religious issue still survived sufficiently to create a jealousy between the Congregational states of the north and Virginia, which desired a bishopric. Looking to and protected as they were by the armies and navy of the British islands, there was a very tardy growth of any sense of unity among themselves. When the Charter of Massachusetts, which, while proclaiming her loyalty, had always been foremost in rebellion, had been forfeited in the seventeenth century, the other colonies were not roused to her defence. Only trade could unite them, and this tie had been belittled by mutual jealousy and by the immense difficulties of transport and communication. They were discouraged from the use of their chief means of intercourse-the sea-by the Navigation Acts which, from 1653, prohibited trade between the colonies and European ports except in British vessels. When at last they presented a united front, it was as a consequence of the success of their great business of smuggling.

Yet the idea of union had been in the air in the eighteenth century and only wanted a cause to give it material form. The northern colonies had attempted union for defence in 1643 ; Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and Newhaven entering for a time into a Confederation of the United Colonies of New England. In 1698 William Penn set forth a scheme for union. In 1754 a plan for the union of the northern colonies was drawn up by Commissioners at the Congress of Albany (Lansdowne MSS., Vol. V. of Reports, 215, Vol. XLVII. of Lansdowne Papers), but it never became law, as the Americans considered that it did not concede sufficient independence, and the British that it gave too much.

Was it chance or design or the unconscious instinct of a new-born imperial spirit which led to the king's ministers so to lay this tax as intimately to connect all public and private business and so bind together the various colonies in jealous opposition to the authority of the British Parliament? When the American demagogue, avoiding the Post Office service, set up his committees of correspondence, his task was made easy by the incidence of a common burden.

v. The British Parliament and Taxation.-Unfortunately, the British Parliament contained few men capable of seeing

the change of conditions or of attempting a remedy. For the most part they agreed with Grenville in looking upon the man who was slack in enforcing the laws in America as a criminal and betrayer of his country. (Grenville Papers, Vol. III., February, 1766.) But there were a few men of foresight and breadth of view in Parliament who could not only see the change of affairs in hard facts but coupled their knowledge with a vision of the probable future. I would not advise anyone who has anything better to do to waste time over reading Hansard's Parliamentary History. "Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land" is equally appropriate to the bushwhackers of Westminster and the pathless forests of its Parliamentary verbiage as to the swamps and savages of the American continent. Yet here and there in this withered waste of life, where Burke is mouthing about tyranny and rights, and Pitt is rejoicing over the rebellion of the men who are tarring and feathering the King's loyal officers, orating about "people so dead to the feelings of liberty as to submit to be slaves," one comes across an oasis where constructive thought was growing, watered by experience and common sense, where the facts of the present were faced without concern for theories of constitutional right or wrong. Such men were able to see that the vital issue was trade, and that trade monopoly in favour of Britain was seriously questioned by the American, and needed reform.

"Our trade to America," wrote Chesterfield to his son in December, 1765, "brings in communibus annis two millions a year; and the Stamp Duty is but estimated at £100,000 a year, which I would by no means bring into the stock of the Exchequer at the loss or even the risk of a million a year to the national stock." Nicholson Calvert went to the heart of the whole question, putting the two positions of no taxation without representation on one part, and the evident fact that there was no country in which there was not somewhere lodged for the superintendency of the whole one supreme legislative authority controlling, directing and governing the whole. As to action, "the House having decided that Great Britain has the right to tax the colonies, the questions were, how far you might be able to carry it into execution, or, being able, how far it may be thought proper or prudent to exert that authority."

He points to the impossibility of taxing the two millions of Americans without their consent. "It matters little whether they are in the right or not. They think themselves so. What must become of your manufacturers here at home while this contest is carrying on with America?"

The one single patriotic statesman who, apart from party, would appear to have gauged the situation in all its aspects, was Thomas Pownall, who had been Governor of Massachusetts during the war, a man who truly loved his own country, thoroughly understood the position of strength in which the colonists stood, and realized the change which had come over their relations with each other since the war. When, in 1767, New York refused to obey an Act ordering them to provide quarters for the troops on the ground that such a demand was taxation by the British Parliament, and coercion is proposed, Pownall says: "Don't fancy that you can divide the people on this point, and that you need only to divide to govern; you will, by this conduct, only unite them the more inseparably; you will make the cause of New York the common cause and will call up every other province and colony to stand forth in their justification."

Looking, as usual, across to France, "The order of Parliament to provide means approaches," he says (P.H., Vol. XVI., p. 331), "too near to the course taken by the arbitrary and despotic spirit of a neighbouring government with the parliaments of its several provinces."

He realizes the stubborn united resistance which was to be expected from all the colonials. "You have, on the one hand, by your declaratory law, asserted your right and power of taxation over the colonies and, as far as this Act (the Quartering Act, 1767) goes, you have exerted the power. On the other hand, it is a fact, which the House ought to be apprised of in all its extent that the people of America universally, unitedly and unalterably are resolved not to submit to any internal tax imposed upon them by any legislature in which they have not a share by representatives of their own election " (ibid., p. 339). He sees that the colonies are moving towards a union among themselves, but that there is as yet no sign of movement such as would unite them in union with the islands on grounds of commercial equality. "Does the ministry," he says, "mean