The course of justice, if no worse than in contemporary England, was evidently but little improved by its passage overseas, or by being administered by those who had been so loud in their denunciations of the summary methods of Laud and the High Commission. It seemed to many, as to the “old planter” Blackstone, that the tyranny of the “Lord-Bishops” had merely been exchanged for that of the “Lord-Brethren”; and it was evident also that the fixed policy of the leaders was to allow no appeals from their decisions to the home courts of England. All the colonists, therefore, who would not, on the one hand, wholly refrain from criticizing the policy and acts of the leaders, and, on the other, prove themselves acceptable to the clergy, and so secure the franchise by being elected freemen, were wholly without representation, without voice in the making of their laws, and without recourse to the courts and king at home. As the charter was that of a trading corporation, the levying of taxes was a mere development of the right to assess shareholders, and, therefore, extended only to freemen. But no such legal restriction was observed, and from the beginning, the authorities taxed the non-freemen equally with themselves, though denying them the political rights which they themselves possessed.[361] Indeed, not only their property was thus subject to enactments in which they had no voice, but their time and the work of their hands as well; for the General Court passed a law that all except members of the court, and officers of the church and commonwealth, were liable to be impressed for manual labor on all public works.[362] The town meeting, indeed, seems to have been the only place in which the great majority of the colonists could legally make their voice heard at all, and there only upon questions concerning the most trivial local matters. Footnote 361: H. L. Osgood, “New England Colonial Finance in the 17th Century”; _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. XIX, p. 82. Footnote 362: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. I, p. 124.