the royal governors were to be paid by the crown and thus
made independent of their legislatures, there would be danger of their
becoming petty tyrants and interfering in many ways with the liberties
of the people. Still greater would be the danger if the judges were to
be paid by the crown, for then they would feel themselves responsible to
the king or to the royal governor, rather than to their fellow-citizens;
and it would be easy for the governors, by appointing corrupt men as
judges, to prevent the proper administration of justice by the courts,
and thus to make men's lives and property insecure. Most Americans in
1750 felt this danger very keenly. They had not forgotten how, in the
times of their grandfathers, two of the noblest of Englishmen, Lord
William Russell and Colonel Algernon Sidney, had been murdered by the
iniquitous sentence of time-serving judges. They had not forgotten the
ruffian George Jeffreys and his "bloody assizes" of 1685. They well
remembered how their kinsmen in England had driven into exile the Stuart
family of kings, who were even yet, in 1745, making efforts to recover
their lost throne. They remembered how the beginnings of New England had
been made by stout-hearted men who could not endure the tyranny of these
same Stuarts; and they knew well that one of the worst of the evils upon
which Stuart tyranny had fattened had been the corruption of the courts
of justice. The Americans believed with some reason, that even now, in
the middle of the eighteenth century, the administration of justice in
their own commonwealths was decidedly better than in Great Britain; and
they had no mind to have it disturbed.

[Sidenote: "No taxation without representation."]

But worse than all, if the expenses of governing America were to be paid
by taxes levied upon Americans and collected from them by king or
parliament or any power whatsoever residing in Great Britain, then the
inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies would at once cease to be
free people. A free country is one in which the government cannot take
away people's money, in the shape of taxes, except for strictly public
purposes and with the consent of the people themselves, as expressed by
some body of representatives whom the people have chosen. If people's
money can be taken from them without their consent, no matter how small
the amount, even if it be less than one dollar out of every thousand,
then they are not politically free. T