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HE work done by Knox and Grenville, in the pamphlet, The Controversy between Great Britain and the Colonies Reviewed, was not wholly negative and critical of the American propositions. A large part of it was devoted to an attempt to prove affirmatively that Great Britain and the Colonies constituted a single Unitary State-that there was no British Empire, but only a British Realm, of which the Colonies were integral parts.

Their first point was that the Parliament of Great Britain was the Supreme Legislature of every person subject to the power of the State of Great Britain, on the theory that every individual within that State, by becoming and remaining subject to its power, had tacitly assented that Parliament should be the Supreme Legislature. They said on this subject:

The subjects of Great Britain [in the Colonies] are not without their representatives, though the members who compose the House of Commons cannot be said to be distinctly So. Neither are they bound by laws, nor is their money taken from them without their own consent given by their representatives. The King, Lords, and Commons are their representatives; for to them it is that they have delegated their individual rights over their lives, liberties, and property; and so long as they approve of that form of government, and continue under it, so long do they consent to whatever is done by those they have intrusted with their rights.

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"Laws they are not (says Hooker) which public approbation hath not made so. But approbation not only they give, who personally declare their assent by voice, sign, or act, but also when others do it in their names, by right originally at the least derived from them. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement." And Mr. Locke, who followed this learned investigator of the rights of mankind, in his answer to Sir Robert Filmer, after having shown that the origin of all power is from the people only; that every form of government, whether a democracy, an oligarchy, an elective or hereditary monarchy, is nothing more than a trust delegated by the society to the person or persons so appointed, lays it down as a fundamental maxim in all Governments: "That the Legislative is the joint power of every member of the society, given up to that person or assembly which is legislator; and that even the Executive, when vested in a single person, is to be considered as the representative of the Commonwealth." And he then adds: "Nobody doubts but an express consent of any man entering into society makes him a perfect member of that society, a subject of that Government. The difficulty is what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent; and to this I say, that every man that hath any possessions or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of any Government, doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that Government during such enjoyment, as any one under it."

Upon this principle, the King and the two Houses of Parliament, are by our Constitution representatives of the Legislative, as the King alone is of the Executive power of the Commonwealth; and upon this principle, every subject of Great Britain, when he is taxed by Parliament, is taxed by his own consent, for he is then taxed by consent of those whom the society has impowered to act for the whole; and every member of that community must therefore subscribe his tacit consent to all such taxes as may be imposed, or other legislative acts that may be done by those whom the society

has appointed, as long as the form of government subsists. This is the British Constitution; and if the British subjects in America still continue to be part of our community, it follows that they also are represented by the British Legislative, and equally bound by its laws.

The answer to this argument, so far as it is founded on the theories of Hooker and Locke, is now easy, but it was not in 1769, because political thought had not then evolved to the point where the State as organized for the purposes of war, was distinguished from the State as organized for the purposes of peace. In the State as organized for the purposes of war, only one Legislature and Executive was possible, and, for the most effective exercise of the power of the State, it was necessary that all power should be in the hands of one individual. For a long time after the condition of peace came to be the normal condition of the State, and the Sovereign became a body of persons instead of a single individual, the theory that the power of the supreme governing person or body was indivisible, remained undisputed. It was not until the American Revolution that it was perceived that the will of the people was the supreme power, and that all governmental power was an agency for them, which they might divide in time of peace between two or more governmental agents, so that each should exercise a supreme governmental agency within its sphere. When Hooker and Locke wrote, the conception of divided supreme governmental agency, on which was based the claim of the Colonies to be Member-States of the British Federal Empire, was unknown.

The next argument was that, because the rights of the Colonies were originally derived from the Crown through charters or commissions granted by it, which necessarily implied an original submission to Parliament as the Supreme Legislature, the Colonies could not claim to be

Member-States of a Federal Empire, because this would imply a subsequent dispensation by the Crown, by which the Colonies were in whole or in part released from the supreme legislative authority of Parliament, which the Crown had never purported to give and which it could not have given, especially since the Act of Settlement of 1689, by which the King recognized that he had no power to dispense with statutes. They said:

That the first inhabitants of the Colonies were part of the British community, and bound to obey its legislative power in all respects, as any other subjects at the time of the establishment of those Colonies, will not be denied. How then has that obedience been altered or released? Those Colonies were all created by charters or temporary authorities, from the Executive Power of this community, except in the cases of Jamaica, New York, and the late acquisition of Quebec, the Ceded Islands, and the two Floridas, which were conquests made by this community upon foreign powers, and such of their subjects as remained were incorporated with us under our laws and obedience. And it cannot, we have seen, be pretended, that this obedience has been altered or released by charters or authorities from the Executive Power; for, on the contrary, the obedience to the laws of Great Britain, without any restriction, is expressly reserved in every one of them, and particularly the right of taxation is mentioned and reserved to the Parliament of Great Britain by the Charter of Pennsylvania, in which Colony Mr. Dickinson wrote his Farmer's Letters.

This argument was difficult to answer in 1769. The character of the Colonies as Member-States of the Federal Empire arose neither from the act of King or Parliament, but in part from their being under the power of the State of Great Britain, and in part from the nature of things. The acts of the Crown derived their force not merely from the fact that they were expressions of the

will of the King or of the State of Great Britain, but also and principally because they were adjudications made by the King under expert advice, concerning the character and extent of the rights of member-statehood which the Colonies ought, on just principles, to have in the Federal Empire. The question, therefore, was not of the right of the Crown to release or discharge the Colonies, in whole or in part, from the power of Parliament, but of the right of the Crown to adjudicate in what manner, and to what extent, the Colonies were, in the nature of things, released and discharged, in time of peace, from the power of the State of Great Britain.

The authors also claimed that, in the case of the inhabitants of the Colonies, there was a special reason why they should be considered as an integral part of the population of the British State, namely, that the proprietary title to the soil itself, as well as the governmental authority over the soil, had been originally vested in the State of Great Britain by discovery, and that the inhabitants had recognized this original and paramount title in many ways, and particularly by paying to the Crown, i.e., to the State of Great Britain, rents, called quit-rents, reserved by it, in lieu of the military or other service which the occupant of the land would otherwise owe. argument on this point was as follows:

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It is however pretended, that the lands in America lying without the Realm, and appertaining to the King only, their possessors cannot, from those circumstances, be subject to the jurisdiction of Parliament, whose authority is necessarily confined within the limits of the Realm. This plea, it is presumed, cannot be made by the inhabitants of such lands as were conquered by the forces of the British State from foreign powers, or ceded to Great Britain by treaty. Those conquests or cessions are surely the dominions of the Crown of Great Britain, not the private property of the King, which have