udicial to the
national interest to impose parliamentary taxes. The advantages promised
by an increase of the revenue are all fallacious and delusive. You will
lose more than you will gain. Britain already reaps the profit of all
their trade, and of the increase of their substance. By cherishing their
present turn of mind, you will serve your interest more than by your
present schemes.

Thomas Hutchinson, or any other man, might write a private letter
without committing his country, or, with due caution to his
correspondent, even himself; but for effective public and official
protest the colonial assemblies were the proper channels, and very
expert they were in the business, after having for half a century and
more devoted themselves with singleness of purpose to the guardianship
of colonial liberties. Until now, liberties had been chiefly threatened
by the insidious designs of colonial governors, who were for the most
part appointed by the Crown and very likely therefore to be infected
with the spirit of prerogative than which nothing could be more
dangerous, as everyone must know who recalled the great events of the
last century. With those great events, the eminent men who directed the
colonial assemblies--heads or scions or proteges of the best families in
America, men of wealth and not without reading--were entirely familiar;
they knew as well as any man that the liberties of Englishmen had been
vindicated against royal prerogative only by depriving one king of his
head and another of his crown; and they needed no instruction in the
significance of the "glorious revolution," the high justification of
which was to be found in the political gospel of John Locke, whose
book they had commonly bought and conveniently placed on their library
shelves.

More often than not, it is true, colonial governors were but ordinary
Englishmen with neither the instinct nor the capacity for tyranny,
intent mainly upon getting their salaries paid and laying by a
competence against the day when they might return to England. But if
they were not kings, at least they had certain royal characteristics;
and a certain flavor of despotism, clinging as it were to their official
robes and reviving in sensitive provincial minds the memory of bygone
parliamentary battles, was an ever-present stimulus to the eternal
vigilance which was well known to be the price of liberty.

And so, throughout the eighteenth century, little colonial aristocraci