The War of Independence | Page 9

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 that it should only wield such revenues as the representatives of the people might be pleased to grant it. In England the body which represented the people was the House of Commons, in each of the American colonies it was the colonial legislature; and in dealing with the royal governors, the legislatures acted upon the same general principles as the House of Commons in dealing with the king.
[Sidenote: Sometimes the royal governors were in the right, as to the particular question.]
It was not until some time after 1750