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that place, the wealth their honest endeavors had merited, found themselves and their families, thrown at once on the world, for subsistence by its charities. Not the hundredth part of the inhabit- ants of that town, had been concerned in the act complained of ; many of them were in Great Britain, and in other parts beyond sea; yet all were involved in one indiscrimmate ruin, by a new executive power, unheard of till then, that of a British Parliament. A property of the value of many millions of money, was sacrificed to revenge, not repay, the loss of a few thousands. ‘This is ad- ministering justice with a heavy hand indeed! And when is this tempest to be arrested in its course? ‘Two wharves are to be opened again when his Majesty shall think proper : the residue which lined the extensive shores of the bay of Boston, are forever interdicted the exercise of commerce. ‘This little exception seems to have been thrown in for no other purpose, than that of setting a prece- dent for investing his Majesty with legislative powers. If the pulse of his people shall beat calmly under this experiment, an- other and another will be tried, till the measure of despotism be filled up. It would be an insult on common sense, to pretend that this exception was made, in order to restore its commerce to that great town. ‘The trade which cannot be received at two wharves alone, must of necessity be transferred to some other place; to which it will soon be followed by that of the two wharves. Con- sidered in this light, it would be an insolent and cruel mockery, at the annihilation of the town of Boston. By the act for the sup- pression of riots and tumults in the town of Boston,* passed also in the last session of Parliament, a murder committed there, is, if the Governor pleases, to be tried in-the court of King’s bench, in the island of Great Britam, by a jury of Middlesex. 'The witnesses, too, on receipt of such a sum as the Governor shall think it rea- sonable for them to expend, are to enter nto recognisancé, to ap- pear at the tal. ‘This is, in other words, taxing them to the amount of their recognisance ; and that amount may be whatever a Governor pleases. For who does his Majesty think can be pre- vailed on to cross the Atlantic, for the sole purpose of bearing evidence to a fact? His expenses are to be borne, indeed, as they shall be estimated by a Governor; but who are to feed the wife and children whom he leaves behind, and who have had no other subsistence but his daily labor? Those epidemical disorders, too, so terrible in a foreign climate, is the cure of them to be estimated among the articles of expense, and their danger to be warded off . by the Almighty power of a Parliament? And the wretched crimi-
- 14. G. 3.
