The War of Independence | Page 9

if remunerated by the crown, and the same
might be said of some other public officers. But if the British
government were to undertake to pay the salaries of its officials in
America, it must raise a revenue for the purpose; and it would naturally
raise such a revenue by levying taxes in America rather than in England.
People in England felt that they were already taxed as heavily as they
could bear, in order to pay the expenses of their own government. They
could not be expected to submit to further taxation for the sake of
paying the expenses of governing the American colonies. If further
taxes were to be laid for such a purpose, they must in fairness be laid
upon Americans, not upon Englishmen in the old country.

Such was the view which people in England would naturally be
expected to take, and such was the view which they generally did take.
But there was another side to the question which was very clearly seen
by most people in America. If the royal governors were to be paid by
the crown and thus made independent of their legislatures, there would
be danger of their becoming petty tyrants and interfering in many ways
with the liberties of the people. Still greater would be the danger if the
judges were to be paid by the crown, for then they would feel
themselves responsible to the king or to the royal governor, rather than
to their fellow-citizens; and it would be easy for the governors, by
appointing corrupt men as judges, to prevent the proper administration
of justice by the courts, and thus to make men's lives and property
insecure. Most Americans in 1750 felt this danger very keenly. They
had not forgotten how, in the times of their grandfathers, two of the
noblest of Englishmen, Lord William Russell and Colonel Algernon
Sidney, had been murdered by the iniquitous sentence of time-serving
judges. They had not forgotten the ruffian George Jeffreys and his
"bloody assizes" of 1685. They well remembered how their kinsmen in
England had driven into exile the Stuart family of kings, who were
even yet, in 1745, making efforts to recover their lost throne. They
remembered how the beginnings of New England had been made by
stout-hearted men who could not endure the tyranny of these same
Stuarts; and they knew well that one of the worst of the evils upon
which Stuart tyranny had fattened had been the corruption of the courts
of justice. The Americans believed with some reason, that even now, in
the middle of the eighteenth century, the administration of justice in
their own commonwealths was decidedly better than in Great Britain;
and they had no mind to have it disturbed.
[Sidenote: "No taxation without representation."]
But worse than all, if the expenses of governing America were to be
paid by taxes levied upon Americans and collected from them by king
or parliament or any power whatsoever residing in Great Britain, then
the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies would at once cease to
be free people. A free country is one in which the government cannot
take away people's money, in the shape of taxes, except for strictly

public purposes and with the consent of the people themselves, as
expressed by some body of representatives whom the people have
chosen. If people's money can be taken from them without their consent,
no matter how small the amount, even if it be less than one dollar out of
every thousand, then they are not politically free. They do not govern,
but the power that thus takes their money without their consent is the
power that governs; and there is nothing to prevent such a power from
using the money thus obtained to strengthen itself until it can trample
upon people's rights in every direction, and rob them of their homes
and lives as well as of their money. If the British government could tax
the Americans without their consent, it might use the money for
supporting a British army in America, and such an army might be
employed in intimidating the legislatures, in dispersing town-meetings,
in destroying newspaper-offices, or in other acts of tyranny.
[Sidenote: It was the fundamental principle of English liberty.]
The Americans in the middle of the eighteenth century well understood
that the principle of "no taxation without representation" is the
fundamental principle of free government. It was the principle for
which their forefathers had contended again and again in England, and
upon which the noble edifice of English liberty had been raised and
consolidated since the grand struggle between king and barons in the
thirteenth century. It had passed into a tradition, both in England and in
America, that in order to prevent the crown from becoming despotic, it
was necessary