Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 176
A colony is to the mother-country, as a member to the body, deriving its action and its strength from the general principle of vitality; receiving from the body, and communicating to it, all the benefits and evils of health and disease; liable, in dangerous maladies, to sharp applications, of which the body, however, must partake the pain; and exposed, if incurably tainted, to amputation, by which the body, likewise, will be mutilated.
The mother-country always considers the colonies, thus connected, as parts of itself; the prosperity or unhappiness of either, is the prosperity or unhappiness of both; not, perhaps, of both in the same degree, for the body may subsist, though less commodiously, without a limb, but the limb must perish, if it be parted from the body.
Our colonies, therefore, however distant, have been, hitherto, treated as constituent parts of the British empire. The inhabitants incorporated by English charters are entitled to all the rights of Englishmen. They are governed by English laws, entitled to English dignities, regulated by English counsels, and protected by English arms; and it seems to follow, by consequence not easily avoided, that they are subject to English government, and chargeable by English taxation.
To him that considers the nature, the original, the progress, and the constitution of the colonies, who remembers that the first discoverers had commissions from the crown, that the first settlers owe to a charter their civil forms and regular magistracy, and that all personal immunities and legal securities, by which the condition of the subject has been, from time to time, improved, have been extended to the colonists, it will not be doubted, but the parliament of England has a right to bind them by statutes, and to bind them in all cases whatsoever; and has, therefore, a natural and constitutional power of laying upon them any tax or impost, whether external or internal, upon the product of land, or the manufactures of industry, in the exigencies of war, or in the time of profound peace, for the defence of America, for the purpose of raising a revenue, or for any other end beneficial to the empire.
There are some, and those not inconsiderable for number, nor contemptible for knowledge, who except the power of taxation from the general dominion of parliament, and hold, that whatever degress of obedience may be exacted, or whatever authority may be exercised in other acts of government, there is still reverence to be paid to money, and that legislation passes its limits when it violates the purse.
Of this exception, which, by a head not fully impregnated with politicks, is not easily comprehended, it is alleged, as an unanswerable reason, that the colonies send no representatives to the house of commons.
It is, say the American advocates, the natural distinction of a freeman, and the legal privilege of an Englishman, that he is able to call his possessions his own, that he can sit secure in the enjoyment of inheritance or acquisition, that his house is fortified by the law, and that nothing can be taken from him, but by his own consent. This consent is given for every man by his representative in parliament. The Americans, unrepresented, cannot consent to English taxations, as a corporation, and they will not consent, as individuals.
Of this argument, it has been observed by more than one, that its force extends equally to all other laws, for a freeman is not to be exposed to punishment, or be called to any onerous service, but by his own consent. The congress has extracted a position from the fanciful Montesquieu that, “in a free state, every man, being a free agent, ought to be concerned in his own government.” Whatever is true of taxation, is true of every other law, that he who is bound by it, without his consent, is not free, for he is not concerned in his own government.
He that denies the English parliament the right of taxation, denies it, likewise, the right of making any other laws, civil or criminal, yet this power over the colonies was never yet disputed by themselves. They have always admitted statutes for the punishment of offences, and for the redress or prevention of inconveniencies; and the reception of any law draws after it, by a chain which cannot be broken, the unwelcome necessity of submitting to taxation.
That a freeman is governed by himself, or by laws to which he has consented, is a position of mighty sound; but every man that utters it, with whatever confidence, and every man that hears it, with whatever acquiescence, if consent be supposed to imply the power of refusal, feels it to be false. We virtually and implicitly allow the institutions of any government, of which we enjoy the benefit, and solicit the protection. In wide extended dominions, though power has been diffused with the most even hand, yet a very small part of the people are either primarily or secondarily consulted in legislation. The business of the publick must be done by delegation. The choice of delegates is made by a select number, and those who are not electors stand idle and helpless spectators of the commonweal, “wholly unconcerned in the government of themselves.”
Of the electors the hap is but little better. They are often far from unanimity in their choice; and where the numbers approach to equality, almost half must be governed not only without, but against their choice.
How any man can have consented to institutions established in distant ages, it will be difficult to explain. In the most favourite residence of liberty, the consent of individuals is merely passive; a tacit admission, in every community, of the terms which that community grants and requires. As all are born the subjects of some state or other, we may be said to have been all born consenting to some system of government. Other consent than this the condition of civil life does not allow. It is the unmeaning clamour of the pedants of policy, the delirious dream of republican fanaticism.
But hear, ye sons and daughters of liberty, the sounds which the winds are wafting from the western continent. The Americans are telling one another, what, if we may judge from their noisy triumph, they have but lately discovered, and what yet is a very important truth: “That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property; and that they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent.”
While this resolution stands alone, the Americans are free from singularity of opinion; their wit has not yet betrayed them to heresy. While they speak as the naked sons of nature, they claim but what is claimed by other men, and have withheld nothing but what all withhold. They are here upon firm ground, behind entrenchments which never can be forced.
Humanity is very uniform. The Americans have this resemblance to Europeans, that they do not always know when they are well. They soon quit the fortress, that could neither have been ruined by sophistry, nor battered by declamation. Their next resolution declares, that “Their ancestors, who first settled the colonies, were, at the time of their emigration from the mother-country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects within the realm of England.”
This, likewise, is true; but when this is granted, their boast of original rights is at an end; they are no longer in a state of nature. These lords of themselves, these kings of ME, these demigods of independence sink down to colonists, governed by a charter. If their ancestors were subjects, they acknowledged a sovereign; if they had a right to English privileges, they were accountable to English laws; and, what must grieve the lover of liberty to discover, had ceded to the king and parliament, whether the right or not, at least, the power of disposing, “without their consent, of their lives, liberties, and properties.” It, therefore, is required of them to prove, that the parliament ever ceded to them a dispensation from that obedience, which they owe as natural-born subjects, or any degree of independence or immunity, not enjoyed by other Englishmen.
They say, that by such emigration, they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights; but, that “they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.”
That they who form a settlement by a lawful charter, having committed no crime, forfeit no privileges, will be readily confessed; but what they do not forfeit by any judicial sentence, they may lose by natural effects. As man can be but in one place, at once, he cannot have the advantages of multiplied residence. He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade. He who goes voluntarily to America, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe. He, perhaps, had a right to vote for a knight or burgess; by crossing the Atlantick, he has not nullified his right; but he has made its exertion no longer possible. By his own choice he has left a country, where he had a vote and little property, for another, where he has great property, but no vote. But as this preference was deliberate and unconstrained, he is still “concerned in the government of himself;” he has reduced himself from a voter, to one of the innumerable multitude that have no vote. He has truly “ceded his right,” but he still is governed by his own consent; because he has consented to throw his atom of interest into the general mass of the community. Of the consequences of his own act he has no cause to complain; he has chosen, or intended to choose, the greater good; he is represented, as himself desired, in the general representation.
But the privileges of an American scorn the limits of place; they are part of himself, and cannot be lost by departure from his country; they float in the air, or glide under the ocean:
“Doris amara suam non intermisceat undam.”
A planter, wherever he settles, is not only a freeman, but a legislator: “ubi imperator, ibi Roma.” “As the English colonists are not represented in the British parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several legislatures, in all cases of taxation and internal polity, subject only to the negative of the sovereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accustomed. We cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of the British parliament, as are, bona fide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce — excluding every idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects of America, without their consent.”
Their reason for this claim is, “that the foundation of English liberty, and of all government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council.”
“They inherit,” they say, “from their ancestors, the right which their ancestors possessed, of enjoying all the privileges of Englishmen.” That they inherit the right of their ancestors is allowed; but they can inherit no more. Their ancestors left a country, where the representatives of the people were elected by men particularly qualified, and where those who wanted qualifications, or who did not use them, were bound by the decisions of men, whom they had not deputed.
The colonists are the descendants of men, who either had no vote in elections, or who voluntarily resigned them for something, in their opinion, of more estimation; they have, therefore, exactly what their ancestors left them, not a vote in making laws, or in constituting legislators, but the happiness of being protected by law, and the duty of obeying it.
What their ancestors did not carry with them, neither they nor their descendants have since acquired. They have not, by abandoning their part in one legislature, obtained the power of constituting another, exclusive and independent, any more than the multitudes, who are now debarred from voting, have a right to erect a separate parliament for themselves.
Men are wrong for want of sense, but they are wrong by halves for want of spirit. Since the Americans have discovered that they can make a parliament, whence comes it that they do not think themselves equally empowered to make a king? If they are subjects, whose government is constituted by a charter, they can form no body of independent legislature. If their rights are inherent and underived, they may, by their own suffrages, encircle, with a diadem, the brows of Mr. Cushing.
It is further declared, by the congress of Philadelphia, “that his majesty’s colonies are entitled to all the privileges and immunities granted and confirmed to them by royal charters, or secured to them by their several codes of provincial laws.”
The first clause of this resolution is easily understood, and will be readily admitted. To all the privileges which a charter can convey, they are, by a royal charter, evidently entitled. The second clause is of greater difficulty; for how can a provincial law secure privileges or immunities to a province? Provincial laws may grant, to certain individuals of the province, the enjoyment of gainful, or an immunity from onerous offices; they may operate upon the people to whom they relate; but no province can confer provincial privileges on itself. They may have a right to all which the king has given them; but it is a conceit of the other hemisphere, that men have a right to all which they have given to themselves.
A corporation is considered, in law, as an individual, and can no more extend its own immunities, than a man can, by his own choice, assume dignities or titles.
The legislature of a colony (let not the comparison be too much disdained) is only the vestry of a larger parish, which may lay a cess on the inhabitants, and enforce the payment; but can extend no influence beyond its own district, must modify its particular regulations by the general law, and, whatever may be its internal expenses, is still liable to taxes laid by superiour authority.
The charters given to different provinces are different, and no general right can be extracted from them. The charter of Pennsylvania, where this congress of anarchy has been impudently held, contains a clause admitting, in express terms, taxation by the parliament. If, in the other charters, no such reserve is made, it must have been omitted, as not necessary, because it is implied in the nature of subordinate government. They who are subject to laws, are liable to taxes. If any such immunity had been granted, it is still revocable by the legislature, and ought to be revoked, as contrary to the publick good, which is, in every charter, ultimately intended.
Suppose it true, that any such exemption is contained in the charter of Maryland, it can be pleaded only by the Marylanders. It is of no use for any other province; and, with regard even to them, must have been considered as one of the grants in which the king has been deceived; and annulled, as mischievous to the publick, by sacrificing to one little settlement the general interest of the empire; as infringing the system of dominion, and violating the compact of government. But Dr. Tucker has shown, that even this charter promises no exemption from parliamentary taxes.
In the controversy agitated about the beginning of this century, whether the English laws could bind Ireland, Davenant, who defended against Molyneux the claims of England, considered it as necessary to prove nothing more, than that the present Irish must be deemed a colony.
The necessary connexion of representatives with taxes, seems to have sunk deep into many of those minds, that admit sounds, without their meaning.
Our nation is represented in parliament by an assembly as numerous as can well consist with order and despatch, chosen by persons so differently qualified in different places, that the mode of choice seems to be, for the most part, formed by chance, and settled by custom. Of individuals, far the greater part have no vote, and, of the voters, few have any personal knowledge of him to whom they intrust their liberty and fortune.
Yet this representation has the whole effect expected or desired, that of spreading so wide the care of general interest, and the participation of publick counsels, that the advantage or corruption of particular men can seldom operate with much injury to the publick.
For this reason many populous and opulent towns neither enjoy nor desire particular representatives: they are included in the general scheme of publick administration, and cannot suffer but with the rest of the empire.
It is urged, that the Americans have not the same security, and that a British legislator may wanton with their property; yet, if it be true, that their wealth is our wealth, and that their ruin will be our ruin, the parliament has the same interest in attending to them, as to any other part of the nation. The reason why we place any confidence in our representatives is, that they must share in the good or evil which their counsels shall produce. Their share is, indeed, commonly consequential and remote; but it is not often possible that any immediate advantage can be extended to such numbers as may prevail against it. We are, therefore, as secure against intentional depravations of government, as human wisdom can make us, and upon this security the Americans may venture to repose.
It is said, by the old member who has written an appeal against the tax, that “as the produce of American labour is spent in British manufactures, the balance of trade is greatly against them; whatever you take directly in taxes is, in effect, taken from your own commerce. If the minister seizes the money, with which the American should pay his debts, and come to market, the merchant cannot expect him as a customer, nor can the debts, already contracted, be paid. — Suppose we obtain from America a million, instead of one hundred thousand pounds, it would be supplying one personal exigence by the future ruin of our commerce.”
Part of this is true; but the old member seems not to perceive, that, if his brethren of the legislature know this as well as himself, the Americans are in no danger of oppression, since by men commonly provident they must be so taxed, as that we may not lose one way, what we gain another.
The same old member has discovered, that the judges formerly thought it illegal to tax Ireland, and declares that no cases can be more alike than those of Ireland and America; yet the judges whom he quotes have mentioned a difference. Ireland, they say, “hath a parliament of its own.” When any colony has an independent parliament, acknowledged by the parliament of Britain, the cases will differ less. Yet, by the sixth of George the first, chapter fifth, the acts of the British parliament bind Ireland.
