instructions should direct. In
addition to these provincial bodies a council of thirteen, likewise
appointed by the King, was to be created in England, to which was
committed the general duty of superintending the affairs of both
colonies.

And to prove the pious designs of a monarch whose religion neither
checked the bigotry of his spirit nor the profaneness of his language it
was recited in the preamble of this charter that one leading object of
the enterprise was the propagation of Christianity among "such people as
yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and
worship of God, and might in time be brought to human civility and to a
settled and quiet government."

Such was the first charter of James to the colony of Virginia. We will
not now pause to consider it minutely either for praise or for blame.
With some provisions that seem to be judicious, and which afterward
proved themselves to be salutary, it embraces the most destructive
elements of despotism and dissension. The settlers were deprived of the
meanest privilege of self-government, and were subjected to the control
of a council wholly independent of their own action, and of laws
proceeding directly or indirectly from the King himself. The Parliament
of England would have been a much safer depositary of legislative power
for the colonists than the creatures of a monarch who held doctrines
worthy of the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of the Russian empire.

But all parties seemed well satisfied with this charter, and neither the
King nor the adventurers had before their minds the grand results that
were now giving birth. The patentees diligently urged forward
preparations for the voyage, and James employed his leisure hours in
preparing the instructions and code of laws contemplated by the charter.
His wondrous wisdom rejoiced in the task of acting the modern Solon, and
penning statutes which were to govern the people yet unborn; and neither
his advisers nor the colonists seemed to have reflected upon the enormous
exercise of prerogative herein displayed. The adventurers did not cease
to be Englishmen in becoming settlers of a foreign clime, and the charter
had expressly guaranteed to them "all liberties, franchises, and
immunities" enjoyed by native-born subjects of the realm. Even acts of
full Parliament bind not the colonies unless they be expressly included,
and an English writer of subsequent times has not hesitated to pronounce