and extent of all its powers over them and the principles on which those powers rest, but being willing to enter into a constitutional settlement which will relieve the present situation, will agree that Great Britain has the right, by Act of its Parliament, to regulate the trade and commerce of the Colonies to the extent and in the manner practiced prior to the Tariff Act of 1764, provided Great Britain will agree that it has no right to tax the Colonies, and that this agreement shall be construed as an admission that it has no right to levy customs duties except as an incident to the regulation of commerce and to the extent necessary for that purpose.

Dickinson did not fail to point out the violations committed by Parliament, otherwise than by way of taxation, of the constitutional rights of the inhabitants of the Colonies, and of the Colonies as States. The provision of the Tariff Act of 1767, by which the proceeds of the taxes were to be used for making a more certain and adequate provision for defraying the charge of the administration of justice and the support of civil government in such Provinces where it shall be found necessary," he particularly criticised as an attack upon the statehood of the Colonies, demanding, in their behalf, a Local Administration and a Local Judiciary responsible to the people of the Colonies. Particularly, he demanded a Colonial Judiciary which, though appointed by the Crown, should be secured in office during good behavior, and whose salaries should be such as the Colonial Legislatures should determine.

Franklin had an edition of The Farmer's Letters published in England, and they were translated and printed in France and went through several editions in both countries. Richard Henry Lee had an edition printed in Virginia, and another was published in Boston.

Dickinson's counter-proposition met with almost universal approval throughout the Colonies. Jefferson, speaking of the situation in Virginia in 1768, in his

Autobiography, while declaring that, in his view, the relation between Great Britain and the American Colonies was " exactly the same as that of England and Scotland after the accession of James and until the Union, and the same as her present relations with Hanover," frankly adds:

In this doctrine, however, I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe. He concurred in it from the first dawn of the question, What was the political relation between us and England?" Our other patriots, Randolph, the Lees, Nicholas, Pendleton, stopped at the half-way house of John Dickinson, who admitted that England had a right to regulate our commerce, and to levy duties on it for the purposes of regulation, but not of raising revenue.

In Massachusetts, the approval took an organized form. At a town-meeting held in Boston on March 14, 1768, it was voted "that the thanks of the Town be given to the ingenious author of a course of letters published at Philadelphia and in this place, signed ‘A Farmer,' wherein the rights of American subjects are clearly stated and fully vindicated," and a committee, of which John Hancock and Samuel Adams were members, was appointed "to prepare and publish a letter of thanks accordingly.' In the letter which was accordingly prepared and which was adopted at a town-meeting held ten days later, the Town of Boston declared that to Dickinson America is obliged for a most seasonable, sensible, loyal and vigorous vindication of her invaded rights and liberties," and added:

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Nor is this Western world alone indebted to your wisdom, fortitude and patriotism; Great Britain also may be confirmed by you that to be truly great and successful, she must be just; that to oppress America is to violate her own honor, defeat her brightest prospects and contract her spreading Empire.

Thus in all sections of America, Dickinson was recognized as the Commissioner for the Colonies to treat with Great Britain, and his counter-proposition for a constitutional settlement approved by what was virtually a plebiscite. At the time The Farmer's Letters were published, however, Lord Chatham was out of power, and the disposition of the Ministry was to adopt temporizing measures, in the hope of avoiding a constitutional settlement with the Colonies.

A

CHAPTER XI

IMPERIAL UNITY, 1768

S a result of the consideration given to the question of the relationship between Great Britain and the Colonies prior to 1768, two distinct views of the unity of the British Empire were beginning to be held, according to one of which the Empire was a permanent Union of States, in which the Imperial State governed the others according to its mere will, except in so far as it had agreed not to govern them at all; and according to the other, a temporary Union of States which might be converted, at the option of Great Britain, into a Unitary State-that is, an aggregation of lands and persons under the British Government. Of the first view Governor Bernard was the principal exponent. In a letter of January 28, 1768, published in his Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America, he used the expression "Imperial State" to describe Great Britain and the expression "dependent States" to describe the Colonies, and used language which showed that he regarded the relationship as a permanent one. In this letter he said:

When the dispute has been carried so far as to involve in it matters of the highest importance to the Imperial Sovereignty; when it has produced questions which the Sovereign State cannot give up, and the dependent States insist upon as the terms of a reconciliation; when the Imperial State has so far given way as to let the dependent States flatter themselves that their pretensions are admissible; whatever terms of reconciliation time, accident or design may produce, if they

are deficient in settling the true relation of Great Britain to her Colonies and ascertaining the bounds of the Sovereignty of the one, and the dependence of the other, conciliation will be no more than a suspension of animosity; the seeds of which will be left in the ground ready to start up again whenever there shall be a new occasion for the Americans to assert their independence of the authority of Parliament; that is, whenever the Parliament shall make ordinances which the Americans shall think not for their interest to obey.

Ex-Governor Pownall, in the fourth edition of his book The Administration of the Colonies, in 1768, took the position that, whether or not the Colonies had ever been related to Great Britain as States, nevertheless, when Parliament elected to tax them, they were thereby incorporated into the British Realm and their inhabitants merged with the inhabitants of Great Britain. He criticised the language of the Declaratory Act of 1766, in which the British Government had taken the position that the Colonies and their inhabitants were dependent upon the Imperial Crown of Great Britain, because, as he claimed, it contained an admission that the Colonies were outside the Realm. He reasoned that in the expression "the Imperial Crown of Great Britain," it was necessarily implied that the State of Great Britain was the Sovereign of the dependencies and their inhabitants, and that, since the State of Great Britain, as Sovereign, necessarily acted through its whole Government, consisting of King, Lords, and Commons, that whole Government constituted the Imperial Crown. If so, he argued that, since the powers of the whole British Government must be determined by the powers of the British State, as King or Sovereign of the Colonies and their inhabitants, and since the powers of the British State, as Sovereign, over the Colonies, must be conditioned and limited in the same way that the powers of any natural person, as Sovereign, would be conditioned and limited, this theory