We cannot help, before we conclude, expressing our great concern, that your Excellency has thus repeatedly, in a manner, insisted upon our free sentiments on matters of so delicate a nature and weighty importance. The question appears to us, to be no other, than, whether we are the subjects of absolute unlimited power, or of a free government, formed on the principles of the English constitution. If your Excellency's doctrine be true, the people of this province hold their lands of the Crown and people of England; and their lives, liberties, and properties, are at their disposal, and that, even by compact and their own consent. They were subject to the King as the head alterius populi of another people, in whose Legislative they have no voice or interest. They are, indeed, said to have a constitution and a Legislative of their own; but your Excellency has explained it into a mere phantom; limited, controled, superseded, and nullified, at the will of another. Is this the constitution which so charmed our ancestors, that, as your Excellency has informed us, they kept a day of solemn thanksgiving to Almighty God when they received it? And were they men of so little discernment, such children in understanding, as to please themselves with the imagination, that they were blessed with the same rights and liberties which natural born subjects in England enjoyed, when, at the same time, they had fully consented to be ruled and ordered by a Legislative, a thousand leagues distant from them, which cannot be supposed to be sufficiently acquainted with their circumstances, if concerned for their interest, and in which, they cannot be in any sense represented? 1 Hutchinson is the principal authority for the statement that this document, as well as that of January 26, 1773, was prepared by Adams. Cf., R. Frothingham, Life of Joseph Warren, p. 223. W. V. Wells, Life of Samuel Adams, vol. ii., p. 45. An instance of the later recognition of this claim is in Publications, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. vi., p. 170. And see also above, pages 401, 430. 2 Massachusetts State Papers, p. 338. 3Ibid., pp. 368-381. February 16. 4 See above, page 430. 5 Rep. x. (16o8). Referred to as the leading case" on the subject as recently as 1897. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 United States Reports, 649. 6 Jer. Dummer, A Defence of the New England Charters. London, 1721, p. 57 7 Ibid., pp. 58, 59. 8 Ibid., p. 59. 9 Jer. Dummer, A Defence of the New England Charters. London, 1721, pp. 59, 60. The quotation is abridged. 10 T. Hutchinson, History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, vol. i., p. 319. 11 T. Hutchinson, History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, vol. i., p. 387. 12 14 Geo. II., chap. 37.