Massachusetts Bay, and prayed his Majesty "to direct the Governor
(Barnard) to take the most effectual methods for procuring the fullest
information touching all treason or misprision of treason within the
Government since the 30th day of December, 1767, and to transmit the
same, together with the names of the persons who were most active in the
commission of such offences, to one of the Secretaries of State, in
order that his Majesty might issue a special commission for inquiring,
hearing and determining the said offences, _within the realm of Great
Britain_, pursuant to the provision of the statute of the 35th of Henry
the Eighth."

The holding of town-meetings and their election of deputies, etc., were
as much provided for in the provincial laws as the meeting and
proceedings of the House of Representatives, or as are the meetings and
proceedings of town, and township, and county municipal councils in
Canada. The wholesale denunciations of disloyalty and treason against
the people of a country was calculated to exasperate and produce the
very feelings imputed; and the proposal of the two Houses of Parliament
to make the Governor of Massachusetts Bay a detective and
informer-general against persons opposed to his administration and the
measures of the British Ministry, and the proposition to have them
arrested and brought 3,000 miles over the ocean to England, for trial
before a special commission, for treason or misprision of treason, show
what unjust, unconstitutional, and foolish things Parliaments as well as
individuals may sometimes perpetrate. Nothing has more impressed the
writer, in going through this protracted war of words, preliminary to
the unhappy war of swords, than the great superiority, even as literary
compositions, much more as State documents, of the addresses and
petitions of the Colonial Assemblies, and even public meetings, and the
letters of their representatives, when compared with the dispatches of
the British Ministry of that day and the writings of their partizans.

The resolutions and joint address of the Houses of Parliament, which
were adopted in February, reached America in April, and gave great
offence to the colonists generally instead of exciting terror,
especially the part of the address which proposed bringing alleged
offenders from Massachusetts to be tried at a tribunal in Great Britain.
Massachusetts had no General Assembly at that time, as Governor Barnard
had dissolved the las