[88] to time, for twenty-four years, as will appear by the Court Records, in which time they have petitioned the Court near if not altogether ten times, putting the town to great charges in meeting together to consider and provide their answers, and to appoint men to attend the Court, and the Committees that have been from time to time appointed by the Court, as also the charges of entertaining them all, which hath been no small disturbance to their more necessary employments for their livelihood, and expense of their time and estates;—yet all this notwithstanding, we are summoned now again to appear before this honored Court to answer their petition exhibited for the very same thing, nothing being added save only sundry falsehoods and clamorous accusations of us: 1 so that now it is not so much Cambridge as the arbitrary and irregular acting of them and their Townsmen that they plead to be delivered from, as being their bondage and burden.It now remains that we speak something as to the main of their petition, which they thus express, i. e., ‘that we may be a township of ourselves, without any more dependence on Cambridge.’ The reasons why we apprehend they may not have this their petition granted them may be taken from—
I. The injustice of this their request, which may thus appear:—1. If it would be accounted injustice for any neighboring towns, or other persons, to endeavor the compassing so great a part or any part of our town limits from us, it is the same (and in some sense far worse) for those that belong to us so to do. This we conceive is plain from God's Word, that styles the child that robs his father to be the companion of a destroyer, or, as some render the word, a murderer; although the child may plead interest in his father's estate, yet he is in God's account a murderer if he takes away that whereby his father's or mother's life should be preserved; and this, we apprehend not to be far unlike the case now before this honored Court. 2. All practices of this nature are condemned by the light of nature, Judges XI. 24. They who had their grants from the heathen idolaters did not account it just that they should be dispossessed by others. And idolatrous Ahab, although he was a king, and a very wicked king also, and wanted not power to effect what he desired, and was so burdened for the want of Naboth's vineyard that he could neither eat nor sleep, and when denied by his own subject tendered a full price for the same, yet he had so much conscience left that he did
