Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in other
colonies, would withhold the Governor's salary until he consented to
their favorite laws. If he vetoed their laws, he received no salary. One
of the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the attempt of the mother
country to make the governors and other colonial officials dependent
for their salaries on the Government in England instead of on the
legislatures in the colonies.

So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined to call them, went on
in Pennsylvania--provincial and petty enough, but often very large and
important so far as the principle which they involved was concerned. The
Legislature of Pennsylvania in those days was a small body composed of
only about twenty-five or thirty members, most of them sturdy, thrifty
Quakers. They could meet very easily anywhere--at the Governor's house,
if in conference with him, or at the treasurer's office or at the loan
office, if investigating accounts. Beneath their broad brim hats and
grave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart as Robin Hood and his
merry men, and in their ninety years of political control they built up
as goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in any community in
the world.

The dignified, confident message from a deputy governor, full of
lofty admonitions of their duty to the Crown, the province, and the
proprietor, is often met by a sarcastic, stinging reply of the Assembly.
David Lloyd, the Welsh leader of the anti-proprietary party, and
Joseph Wilcox, another leader, became very skillful in drafting these
profoundly respectful but deeply cutting replies. In after years,
Benjamin Franklin attained even greater skill. In fact, it is not
unlikely that he developed a large measure of his world famous aptness
in the use of language in the process of drafting these replies. The
composing of these official communications was important work, for a
reply had to be telling and effective not only with the Governor but
with the people who learned of its contents at the coffeehouse and
spread the report of it among all classes. There was not a little
good-fellowship in their contests; and Franklin, for instance, tells us
how he used to abuse a certain deputy governor all day in the Assembly
and then dine with him in jovial intercourse in the evening.

The Assembly had a very convenient way of accomplishing its purposes in
legislation in spite of the opposition of the British Government.
Laws when pa