Note 299 — Chapter IX

"The fundamental idea, of the older British colonial policy appears to have been, that wherever a man went, he carried with him the rights of an Englishman, whatever these were supposed to be. In the reign of James I., the state doctrine was, that most popular rights were usurpations; and the colonists of Virginia, sent out under the protection of government, were therefore placed under that degree of control which the state believed itself authorized to exercise at home. The Puritans exalted civil franchise to a republican pitch: their colonies were therefore republican; there was no such notion as that of an intermediate state of tutelage or semi-liberty. Hence the entire absence of solicitude on the part of the mother country to interfere with the internal government of the colonies arose not altogether from neglect, but partly from principle. This is remarkably proved by the fact that representative government was seldom expressly granted in the early charters; it was assumed by the colonists as a matter of right. Thus, to use the odd expression of the historian of Massachusetts, 'A house of burgesses broke out in Virginia,' in 1619,[300] almost immediately after its second settlement; and although the constitution of James contained no such element, it was at once acceded to by the mother country as a thing of course. No thought was ever seriously entertained of supplying the colonies with the elements of an aristocracy. Virginia was the only province of old foundation in which the Church of England was established; and there it was abandoned, with very little help, to the caprice or prejudices of the colonists, under which it speedily decayed. The Puritans enjoyed, undisturbed, their peculiar notions of ecclesiastical government. 'It concerned New England always to remember that they were originally a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. And if any man among us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the spirit of a true New Englandman.' And when they chose to illustrate this noble principle by decimating their own numbers by persecution, and expelling from their limits all dissenters from their own establishment, the mother country never exerted herself to protect or prohibit. The only ambition of the state was to regulate the trade of its colonies: in this respect, and this only, they were fenced round with restrictions, and watched with the most diligent jealousy. They had a right to self-government and self-taxation; a right to religious freedom, in the sense which they chose themselves to put upon the word; a right to construct their municipal polity as they pleased; but no right to control or amend the slightest fiscal regulation of the imperial authority, however oppressively it might bear upon them.

"Such, I say, were the general notions prevailing in England on the subject of colonial government during the period of the foundation and early development of our transatlantic colonies—the notions by which the practice of government was regulated—although I do not assert that they were framed into a consistent and logical theory. Perhaps we shall not be far wrong in regarding Lord Chatham as the last distinguished assertor of these principles, in an age when they had begun to be partially superseded by newer speculations."—Merivale On Colonization, vol. i., p. 102.