Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/219

 1774] Treason and jury trial 187 behaviour, and to receive fixed salaries without fees. Such, altogether, was the net constitutional result, federal and State. The trouble which arose over the determination to take Americans accused of treason to England for trial, is a shorter matter Orders had gone forth for closing the port of Boston; and, in anticipation of resistance, riots and bloodshed in enforcing the same, the legislation in question had been passed by Parliament. It had lately been resolved in Parliament, said the Continental Congress of Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774, that by force of a statute of the time of Henry VIII, colonists may be transported to England and tried there upon accusation for treason and misprisions, or concealment of treason, committed in the colonies ; and by a late statute such trials had been directed in cases therein mentioned. Against this and other new legislation affecting Massachusetts, it was resolved that at the time of the emigration the colonists were entitled to all the rights, liberties and immunities of free natural born subjects within England; that they had not, by their emigration, forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights; and that their descendants were still entitled to exercise and enjoy the same so far as circumstances enabled them to do so. Accordingly, the colonies were entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and in- estimable privilege of being tried for crime by their peers of the vicinage, by the course of that law. The legislation in question was unjust, unconstitutional, destructive of the rights of Americans. Necessity was of course the justification urged. Boston juries could not be depended upon to convict Boston citizens of crime in resisting officers of the British government, or to acquit officers under indictment for acts done by them in the discharge of their duty ; to which sarcasm might reply, that British juries could be depended upon to convict in the one case and acquit in the other, for want of witnesses who heard and saw. Men accused of crime in Massachusetts must be tried by a Massachusetts jury, not merely because British juries would be apt to be prejudiced against them for what they had done against natives of England, but because witnesses in favour of the accused would not be present at the trial there, or if present would probably be overawed. So Americans maintained ; and that view passed into the State consti- tutions and then into the sixth amendment to the Constitution of the United States. (iii) INTERFERENCE UNDER CLAIM OF UNIVERSAL AUTHORITY. The great dispute between the colonies and Great Britain was of the true relation between the two parts of the British empire. Parliament, first distinctly claiming the right to tax the colonies for the support CH. VI.