[409] particular saving as to all English acts of parliament.Could the king's bench vacate the Massachusetts charter, and yet the parliament be unable to tax them? Do they say this, when they themselves acquiesced in the judgment, and took a new charter?1
chap. XXII.} 1766. Feb.
In 1724, the assembly of Jamaica having refused to raise taxes for their necessary support, the late Lord Hardwicke, then Attorney-General, and Sir Clement Wearg, Solicitor-General, gave their opinion that if Jamaica is to be considered as a conquered country, the king may tax it by his own authority; if otherwise, it must be by the British legislature.
Let the advocates for America draw their line. Let them move their exception, and say how far the sovereignty of the British parliament should go, and where it should stop? Did the Americans keep the right of the purse only, and not of their persons and their liberties?2
But if there was no express law or reason founded upon any necessary inference from an express law, yet the usage alone would be sufficient to support that authority of England over its colonies; for have they not submitted, ever since their first establishment, to the jurisdiction of the mother country? In all questions of property, the appeals from them have been to the privy council here; and such causes have been determined, not by their laws, but by the lawof England. They have been obliged to recur very frequently to the jurisdiction here to settle the disputes among their own governments.
The colonies must remain dependent upon the jurisdiction of the mother country, or they must be totally dismembered from it, and form a league of
