He talks about attempts to strengthen government, and save our charter. With what modesty can he say this, when he knows that the overthrow of our charter was the very object which the junto had been invariably pursuing for a long course of years? Does he think his readers are to be deceived by such gross arts? But he says "the whigs subverted the charter constitution, abridged the freedom of the house, annihilated the freedom of the board, and rendered the governor a doge of Venice." The freedom of the house was never abridged, the freedom of the board was never lessened. The governor had as much power as ever. The house and board, it is true, would do nothing in favour of parliamentary taxation. Their judgments and consciences were against it; and if they ever had done any thing in favour of it, it would have been through fear and not freedom. The governor found he could do nothing in favour of it, excepting to promote, in every department in the state, men who hated the people and were hated by them. Enough of this he did in all conscience; and after filling offices with men who were despised, he wondered that the officers were not revered. "They, the whigs, engrossed all the power of the province into their own hands." That is, the house and board were whigs; the grand juries and petit juries were whigs; towns were whigs; the clergy were whigs; the agents were whigs; and wherever you found people, you found all whigs; excepting those who had commissions from the crown or the governor. This is almost true, and it is to the eternal shame of the tories, that they should pursue their ignis fatuus with such ungovernable fury as they have done, after such repeated and multiplied demonstrations, that the whole people were so universally bent against them. But nothing will satisfy them still, but blood and carnage. The destruction of the whigs, charters, English liberties and all, they must and will have, if it costs the blood of tens of thousands of innocent people. This is the benign temper of the tories.
This influence of the whigs, he calls a democracy or republic, and then a despotism: two ideas incompatible with each other. A democratical despotism is a contradiction in terms.
He then says, that "the good policy of the act for regulating the government in this province, will be the subject of some future paper." But that paper is still to come, and I suspect ever will be. I wish to hear him upon it however.
With this, he and the junto ought to have begun. Bernard and the rest, in 1764, ought to have published their objections to this government, if they had been honest men, and produced their arguments in favour of the alteration, convinced the people of the necessity of it, and proposed some constitutional plan for effecting it. But the same motives which induced them to take another course, will prevail with Massachusettensis to wave the good policy of the act. He will be much more cunningly employed in labouring to terrify women and children with the horrors of a civil war, and the dread of a division among the people. There lies your fort, Massachusettensis, make the most of it.
NOVANGLUS.
ADDRESSED
To the Inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,
February 27, 1775.
MY FRIENDS,
SUCH events as the resistance to the stamp act, and to the tea act, particularly the destruction of that which was sent by the ministry, in the name of the East India Company, have ever been cautiously spoken of by the whigs, because they knew the delicacy of the subject, and they lived in continual hopes of a speedy restoration of liberty and peace. But we are now thrown into a situation, which would render any further delicacy upon this point criminal.
Be it remembered then, that there are tumults, seditions, popular commotions, insurrections and civil wars, upon just occasions, as well as unjust.