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1764-74] Rights of legislation. 191 without their consent. On the contrary he in terms affirmed the right : " the Parliament of Great Britain has a just and equitable right, power, and authority, to impose taxes on the colonies, internal and external, on lands as well as on trade." This was involved in the idea of the sovereign power of the State. But he held that it would be inexpedient and unreasonable for Parliament to exercise the right without allowing the colonies actual representation. Otis was writing in 1765 ; but even then the whole Whig party was against him. The Whigs carried the doctrine of rights under the laws of nature to the conclusion that Parliament had no authority to lay taxes upon the colonies ; the rights of "personal security, personal liberty, and private property" were beyond the reach of Parliament, except as incident to the right of Parliament to regulate the external affairs of the country. That would have been said to be the true effect of Otis' own argument. So far as individual rights were concerned, these absolute rights were perhaps all that the colonists meant when they spoke of rights derived from the laws of nature. "Birthright" had a wider, an indefinite meaning; it was often used to include the common law, the great English statutes, and the British Constitution ; hence many things having no bearing on the question of exemption from Parliamentary control. As a direct consequence of the claim to such exemption in respect of the great individual rights, the Whigs claimed exemption in respect of the means whereby those rights were protected; they had rights to legislatures and Courts of their own. And these rights of direct consequence they also called inherent and indefeasible, and therefore "natural." "The supreme and subordinate powers of legislation should be free and sacred in the hands where the community have once rightfully placed them," as "a natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable right." A legislature of the colonies might be forfeited (in virtue of allegiance) to the Crown, for good cause, according to Otis, who, writing in 1764, went further than the Whig leaders ten years later ; but forfeiture of the kind could not affect the natural persons of the members of the legislature or of the inhabitants of the colonies in their rights of legislation. The colonists would still have the right either to be represented in Parliament or to possess a new subordinate legislature. Seabury, a rector of New York, an able, caustic writer, denied that the colonies had any inherent or natural right of legislation; their powers of legislation were derived from the indulgence or grant of the parent-State. "Upon the supposition that every English colony enjoyed a legislative power independent of the Parliament, and that the Parlia- ment has no just authority to make laws to bind them, this absurdity will follow, that there is no power in the British empire which has authority to make laws for the whole empire; that is, we have an empire without government;... we have a government which has no supreme power." Supreme power must be lodged somewhere.