antile employment and
not attempting to govern." Not a gleam of any other statesmanship
appears in any of the Ministerial speeches than that displayed in the
determination to exact complete submission.

There were passed, accordingly, by the full Ministerial majority, five
measures known as {54} the Coercive Acts, or, in America, as the Five
Intolerable Acts. The first one punished Boston by closing the port to
all trade until the offending town should recompense the East India
Company for the tea destroyed. The next altered the government of
Massachusetts Bay by making the councillors appointive instead of
elective, by placing the appointment and removal of all judicial
officers entirely in the hands of the governor, by placing the
selection of jurors in the hands of the sheriffs and prohibiting
town-meetings--apart from the annual one to elect officers--without the
governor's permission. A third Act authorized the transfer to England
for trial of British officers charged with murder committed while in
discharge of their duties. A fourth Act re-established the system of
quartering troops.

The fifth Act reorganized the province of Quebec, whose government,
under the Proclamation of 1763, had proved defective in several
respects. The legal institutions of the new colony were not well
adapted to the mixed French and British inhabitants, and the religious
situation needed definition. The Quebec Act altered the government of
the province by the creation of an appointive council, authorized the
Catholic Church to collect tithes, and allow the French to substitute
an oath of allegiance for the oath of {55} supremacy. Moreover, French
civil law was permitted to exist. At the same time the boundaries of
the province were extended into the region west of the mountains so as
to include the lands north of the Ohio River.

With the passage of these Acts, the original causes for antagonism were
superseded. The commissioners of customs might have enforced the
Navigation Acts indefinitely; the objectionable Tea Act might have
stood permanently on the statute-book; but, without a more tangible
grievance, it is not easy to conceive of the colonists actually
beginning a revolution. The time had now come when a more serious
issue was raised than the right of Parliament to collect a revenue by a
tariff in the colonies. If Parliament was to be allowed to crush the
prosperity of a colonial seaport, to centralize a hitherto de