The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860Yonge, Charles Duke
History
The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860
Yonge, Charles Duke
Constitutional history -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Great Britain -- History -- George III, 1760-1820
that in the Pennsylvania charter there was a clause by which the King
granted that he would levy no taxes on the inhabitants unless it were
with the consent of the Colonial Assembly, or by an act of Parliament;
words which certainly seemed to reserve a right of taxation to the
British Parliament; but he also demonstrated that, in point of fact, the
latter part of the clause had never been acted on, and the Colonists
had, therefore, relied on it, from the first settlement of the province,
that the Parliament never would nor could, by the color of that clause
in the charter, assume a right of taxing them till it had qualified
itself to exercise such right by admitting representatives from the
people to be taxed. And, in addition to objections on principle, he
urged some that he regarded as of great force as to the working of this
particular tax imposed by the Stamp Act. It was not an equal tax, as the
greater part of the revenue derived from it must arise from lawsuits for
the recovery of debts, and be paid by the lower sort of people; it was a
heavy tax on the poor, and a tax on them for being poor. In the back
settlements, where the population was very thin, the inhabitants would
often be unable to get stamps without taking a long journey for the
purpose. The scarcity of specie, too, in the country would cause the
pressure to be felt with great severity, as, in his opinion, there was
not gold and silver enough in the Colonies to pay the stamp-duty for a
single year. In reply to another question, whether the Colonists would
be satisfied with a repeal of the Stamp Act without a formal
renunciation of the abstract right of Parliament to impose it, he
replied that he believed they would be satisfied. He thought the
resolutions of right would give them very little concern, if they were
never attempted to be carried into practice. The Colonies would probably
consider themselves in the same situation in that respect as Ireland.
They knew that the English Parliament claimed the same right with regard
to Ireland, but that it never exercised it; and they might believe that
they would never exercise it in the Colonies any more than in Ireland.
Indeed, they would think that it never could exercise such a right till
representatives from the Colonies should be admitted into Parliament,
and that whenever an occasion arose to make Parliament regard the
taxation of the Colonies as indispensable, representatives would be
ordered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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