negligent, if not niggardly, in making grants of money to keep up the style of the petty court at the capital; they could darken the days of the colonial governor with bickerings over concessions, appointments, and other favors as the price of money grants. "I have to steer between Scylla and Charybdis," complained Belcher of New Jersey; "to please the king's ministers at home and a touchy people here; to luff for one and bear away for another." He might have added, "and truck and huckster to get my salary from the people's representatives." Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia found his legislature "obstinate, self-opinionated; a stubborn generation." A governor of New York who asked the assembly to vote him a fixed revenue for five years was answered by a demand for the right to appoint every officer deriving emoluments from the grant. Enraged by this boldness, the governor prorogued the assembly and wrote home that the members had taken to themselves "the sole power of rewarding all services and in effect the nomination to all offices, by granting the salary annually, not to the office, but by name to the person in the office." The remedy for such an encroachment on royal authority, in the opinion of the distressed agent of the Crown, was an act of Parliament reducing New York to order. "Till then," he added, "I cannot meet the assembly without danger of exposing the king's authority and myself to contempt.
In this conflict, the fortunes of war were ultimately on the side of the American assembly. Like the English House of Commons, it held the local purse, that powerful engine by which the Crown had been subjected to Parliament. Without legislative grant, there was no money for salaries—a dilemma which could not be avoided by any political legerdemain. Moreover, many governors were as eager to find places for their dependents as to uphold any fine notions of royal prerogative; without appropriation acts, the best of jobs were worthless even to the finest of public servants. In the end, therefore, the popular branch of the colonial legislature became almost sovereign in this sphere.
