What was the foundation of this alleged authority of the king over the colonies? By the public law of all civilized nations in the fifteenth century, the property in unoccupied lands belonged to the crown of the country by which they were discovered;[2] and if, as was generally the case, these lands were inhabited by savages, still the fee was in the crown, subject only to such use as might be made of them by wandering tribes. Such is the law to-day. This title to the English colonies was not in the people of England nor in the state, but in the crown, and descended with it. The crown alone could sell or give away these lands. The crown could make laws for the inhabitants, and repeal them; could appoint their rulers, and remove them. Parliament could do neither. The political relations of the colonists were to the crown, not to the government of England; nor were they in any respect subject to parliamentary legislation.[3] They were not citizens within the realm, nor, except in a qualified sense, of the empire, but subjects of the crown, having only such rights as it granted to them in their charters; and even these charters the crown claimed, and exercised the right to amend or revoke. James I. amended that of Virginia in 1624, and Charles II. revoked that of Massachusetts in 1684. They were regarded merely as charters of incorporated land companies, and, as such, subject to revocation by the king who granted them; and when these companies had developed into municipal governments, they were considered as still subject to alteration or repeal by the sovereign power,[4] although in both cases rights of property were saved to the owners. Strange as this doctrine may seem, it is now substantial law in England and in America. To all these rights, privileges, and disabilities the emigrants agreed when they purchased lands from the crown; and the rights and duties, whether of the crown or of its subjects, descended to their respective successors. With such rights, though not in all cases with such views in respect to them, the colonists came to America; and such rights, and no more, their children possessed, under the British Constitution, at the time of the American Revolution, in the days of George III. These claims of the crown every colony resisted as incompatible with its essential rights, and yet they were legal and constitutional prerogatives, admitted by the greatest judges of England, and most necessarily have been admitted in the colonies not only by Hutchinson and Oliver, but by James Otis and John Adams, had they sat as judges. It was on this legal and constitutional ground that the prerogative party stood both in England and in America.