The Massachusetts Spy, Or, Thomas's Boston Journal

From a late LONDON PAPER.

ADVICES from BOSTON.

BEFORE the last vessels sailed from Boston, they had received there the Act for regulating the province Charter, and that for the better administration of justice; these two acts have thunder-struck the faction, and when the ships sailed, all their writers were in profound silence for the acts were printed without even a factious commentary.— The very spring head, as well as the sources of sedition, are cut off by these acts; now there will be no more ridiculous and treasonable votes at town meeting, where the most ignorant Mechanics, having nobody to oppose them, (the most respectable inhabitants never attended these tumultuous assemblies) talked themselves into such high notions of their own importance, that they believed themselves the fathers of future Kings: Neither will his Majesty's council any longer be the tools of faction, as the regulating act has taken the appointment of them from the assembly: Nor will the grand juries, after this, be composed of the very men who were to be indicted for offences; and the choice of the petty juries being now lodged in the sheriff, will in future prevent the merciful Bostonians from endeavouring to hang, by a packed jury, those whom they had first attempted to murder. If the faction should, contrary to all present appearances and expectation, break out into new riots, and if the military should be found necessary to quell-them, the officers and soldiers will be insured an impartial trial, either by a removal to an adjoining county, or to England. The act for quartering the troops takes away another ground of quarrel, so that nothing that can help to forward the establishment of peace has been left undone. All resort, therefore, that is left the good people Boston, if they will continue turbulent, is to bluster at their own fire-sides, and to raise the admiration of their wives, children and negroes, to talk sedition at their private meetings, over their punch and tobacco; and to print their scandal and scurrility in their own news-papers. Another good will result from the establishment of good order and government in the Massachusetts; opposition at home will be deprived of a principal cause of clamour, and by that means rendered still more contemptibly weak.

[The foregoing publication is very plainly, what idea the writer had of the effects which would follow the operation of these acts—he only mistook it in supposing the good people of this province would submit to them; as they have not, Old-England must tie them about the necks of the chief framers and promoters of those acts, and sink them one and all into political perdition: or otherwise risque the ruin of one or both countries, in compliance to the most abandoned set of men, which any province or kingdom were ever cursed with.]