Page:The general principles of constitutional law in the United States of America.djvu/63

Rh The distinct claim of a right in the Colonies to make their own laws was not made until Parliamentary legislation appeared to threaten oppression. The first actual resistance which assumed general importance was when an attempt was made to impose internal taxation by authority of the imperial Parliament. The proposed taxes were not in themselves a serious burden, and might possibly have passed unchallenged, if it had been certain that the tax law was not to be the herald and the pioneer of others of a different sort, and which would touch the colonists in particulars in which they were even more sensitive than in respect to their pecuniary interests. The power which could tax New England could impose an episcopal hierarchy upon it, and the disposition to do this, not only in New England but in New York, had often manifested itself to an extent that excited the most serious alarm. What vital powers of sovereignty in respect to American concerns might be asserted and exercised, no one could foresee; and the tax laws were therefore resisted rather as the representatives of unknown dangers than for the burdens they imposed. The government for a time abstained from pushing its claims to an extreme, but, lest its doing so might be understood as an assent to the claims of the Colonies, Parliament, when repealing the Stamp Act, which had been rendered abortive by the resistance of the people, took occasion to assert an unqualified right to legislate for the Colonies on all subjects whatever. This claim afterwards assumed practical form in an attempt to collect a tax on tea imported for consumption in the Colonies. The levy of the tax was resisted as an invasion of the undoubted rights of Englishmen, who, in taking up their home in the Colonies, had not lost their right to the protection of the ancient laws of the realm. In Massachusetts and New York cargoes of the taxed tea were destroyed by armed mobs; in Maryland the importer was