On the same day on which the House of Commons voted the grant of the princess's dowry, a memorial from the council and representatives of the colony or province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England, was presented and read from the table. The memorial set forth that the province was placed under conditions of difficulty and distress owing to a royal instruction given to the governor of the province restraining the emission of its bills of credit and restricting the disposal of its public money. The memorial, which seems to have been couched in the most proper and becoming language, prayed that the House would allow the agent for the province to be heard at the bar, and that the House, if satisfied of the justice of the request, would use its influence with the King in order that he might be graciously pleased to withdraw {43} the instructions as contrary to the rights of the charter of Massachusetts Bay, and tending in their nature to distress if not to ruin the province. The House of Commons treated this petition with the most sovereign contempt. After a very short discussion, if it could even be called a discussion, the House passed a resolution declaring the complaint "frivolous and groundless, a high insult upon his Majesty's Government, and tending to shake off the dependency of the said colony upon this kingdom, to which by law and right they are and ought to be subject." The petition was therefore rejected. To the short summary of this piece of business contained in the parliamentary debates the comment is quietly added, "We shall leave to future ages to make remarks upon this resolution, but it seems not much to encourage complaints to Parliament from any of our colonies in the West Indies." Not many ages, not many years even, had to pass before emphatic comment on such a mode of dealing with the complaints of the American colonies was made by the American colonists themselves. Massachusetts Bay took sterner measures next time to make her voice heard and get her wrongs redressed. Just forty years after the insulting and contemptuous rejection of the petition of Massachusetts Bay, the people of Boston spilled the stores of tea into Boston harbor, and two years later still "the embattled farmer," as Emerson calls him, stood up to the British troops at Lexington, in Massachusetts, and won the battle.