Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/365

] of your nation! Consult your history, examine your records of former transactions; nay, turn to the annals of the many arbitrary states and kingdoms that surround you, and show us a single instance of men being condemned to suffer for imputed crimes, unheard, unquestioned, and without even the specious formality of a trial; and that, too, by laws made expressly for the purpose, and which had no existence at the time of the fact committed! If it be difficult to reconcile these proceedings to the genius and temper of your laws and constitution, the task will become more arduous when we call upon our ministerial enemies to justify, not only condemning men untried and by hearsay, but involving the innocent in one common punishment with the guilty, and for the acts of thirty or forty, to bring poverty, distress, and calamity, on thirty thousand souls, and these not your enemies, but your friends, brethren, and fellow subjects.

It would be some consolation to us, if the catalogue of American oppressions ended here. It gives us pain to be reduced to the necessity of reminding you, that under the confidence reposed in the faith of government, pledged in a royal charter from the British sovereign, the forefathers of the present inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay, left their former habitations, and established that great, flourishing, and loyal colony. Without incurring or being charged with a forfeiture of their right, without being heard, without being, tried, and without justice, by an act of Parliament this charter is destroyed, their liberties violated, their constitution and form of government changed; and all this upon no better pretence than because in. one of their towns a trespass was committed upon some merchandise, said to belong to one of the companies, and because the ministry were of opinion, that such high political regulations were necessary to due subordination and obedience to their mandates.

Nor are these the only capital grievances under which we labor : we might tell of dissolute, weak, and wicked governors having been set over us; of legislatures being suspended for asserting the rights of British subjects ; of needy and ignorant dependents on great men advanced to the seats of justice, and to other places of trust and importance; of hard restrictions on commerce, and a great variety of lesser evils, the recollection of which is almost lost under the pressure and weight of greater and more poignant calamities. Now mark the progression of the ministerial plan for enslaving us.

Well aware that such hardy attempts to take our property from us, to deprive us of that valuable right of trial by jury, to seize our persons and carry us for trial to Great Britain, to blockade our ports, to destroy our charters, and change our form of government, would occasion, and had already occasioned, great discontent in the colonies, which would produce opposition to these measures, an act was passed to protect, indemnify and screen from punishment, such as might be guilty even of murder, in endeavoring to carry their oppressive edicts into execution; and by another act the dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed, as that by being disunited from us, detached from our interests, by civil as well as religious prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient, free Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.

This was evidently the object of the act; and in this view, being extremely dangerous to our liberty and quiet, we cannot forbear complaining of it, as hostile to British America. Superadded to these considerations, we cannot help deploring the unhappy condition to which it has reduced the many English settlers, who, encouraged by the royal proclamation, promising the enjoyment of all their rights, have purchased estates in that country. They are now the subjects of an arbitrary government, deprived of trial by jury, and when imprisoned, cannot claim the benefit of the habeas corpus act, that great bulwark and palladium of English liberty; nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion, through every part of the world. This being a true state of facts, let us beseech yon to consider to what end they lead.

Admit the ministry, by the powers of Britain, and the aid of our Roman Catholic neighbors, should be able to carry the point of taxation, and reduce us to a state of perfect humiliation and