ish Parliament and the
Provincial Legislature, acting under its direction and control, strove
to check and subdue, was the awakening of the colonial communities, not
simply to a consciousness of their political rights, but, also, of a
new-born power to maintain and defend them. During the first hundred
years of colonial history King and Parliament, occupied with affairs of
an absorbing character at home, knew little, and cared even less, about
the fate and fortunes of the men and women, who, for the sake of
conscience and religious freedom, had left the land of their birth and
best affection, and were engaged in a heroic contest with nature, on a
wild, desolate, and distant coast. The early colonists were left to a
liberty almost as unfettered as the wild animals and savage tribes whom
they dislodged from their native forests. When, however, the infant
communities had grown strong and prosperous, and had initiated a system
of commerce which bade fair to become expansive and lucrative, they at
once attracted the attention of the State authorities in the land of
their origin. When the conflict with Parliament began, the rights and
immunities claimed by the American colonies, were not matters of statute
and charter. The prescriptive right, which is founded in
long-established custom and usage, rather than in positive enactment,
was the ground of resistance to the encroachments of the Provincial
Executive. When James Otis, in pleading against the "Writs of
Assistance," said, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," he
stated a great political principle; he indicated the great palladium of
popular liberty; but deeper than that principle, in the hearts of the
colonists, lay the sense of uneasiness at the prospect of having the
privileges of one hundred and fifty years in any way compromised,
disturbed, or imperilled. This was the spirit of Franklin, in his "Hints
for a Reply to the Protest of the Lords against the Repeal of the Stamp
Act:" "I will freely spend nineteen shillings in the pound," said he,
"to defend my right of giving or refusing the other shilling; and, after
all, if I cannot defend that right, I can retire cheerfully with my
little family into the boundless woods of America, which are sure to
afford freedom and subsistence to any man who can bait a hook or pull a
trigger." This was the spirit of Otis when he complained that Parliament
regarded the British colonies in America rather as "a parcel of small,
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