The Massachusetts Spy, Or, Thomas's Boston Journal

An ADDRESS to the INHABITANTS Of MASSACHUSETTS-BAY.

For the MASSACHUSETTS SPY.

YOU are Englishmen, and have a right, to all the liberties, privileges and immunities of such! This is the gift of God which no tyrant has a right to bereave you of; and this right is warranted to you by K. William and Q. Mary in behalf of themselves and successors FOREVER, in your charter. In this charter the King has the right of nominating and appointing the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, &c. the people choose their representatives: these representatives elect the councillors (a number of whom are liable the Governor's negative.) The Governor, council and house thus constituted have the sole power of making laws, ordinances, &c. for the well ordering and governing of this province; which laws and ordinances remain perpetual, unless limited in the making, disallowed by the King within three years, or repealed by the same authority by which they were enacted.

This mode of government was always looked upon as indissoluble, and unchangeable otherwise than by the mutual consent of the contracting parties, foreign force or treachery.

That you have generally consented to an alteration of your government, I can by no means suppose; that it is essentially changed, that your Charter is violated, mutilated and totally degraded; that all the valuable part of it is destroyed and some of your most important fundamental laws, have shared the same fate, is too notorious to need my assertions.

In what condition then are you? your government dissolved by having its constitution violently torn to pieces and a form obtruded upon you, abhorred, detested and relucted at by every honest man in this or the neighbouring colonies.

Is this a civil government, or is it an establishment of a lawless and intolerable Tyranny? Does any one pretend it the duty of a free-born Englishman to submit to that system of government, which is indeed subversive of all government, and so far from promoting that it totally destroys the happiness and security of society. Are you not in the most wretched situation, without courts of justice, without any vestige of civil government at all, unless by adopting the new mode you give up your Charter and submit at discretion? Can you brook this submission? I trow not! what alternative then remains? The new creation of a civil government; the maintenance or recovery of the old form, or a return to the state of nature, where every man is his own judge and avenger. Innovations are ever dangerous!

You value your Charter connection, with the King of Great-Britain, and your commercial connection with his subjects there, but you must value your rights, as men!

You will therefore take every measure in your power, that bids fair for a recovery of your ancient form of government, and in consequence will lay every bar in the way to the establishment of the new; considering every person active, aiding and abetting such an establishment as a traitor, parricide and enemy to his country.

Consider brethren what a breach is made upon you!

In every well constituted government, there is a check or balance of power. In Britain it is so divided between the King, Lords and commons that the negative of either, is a check to the other two in the legislative; and in the executive department, the judges are rendered as independent on the crown as possible. Is that your case? Far from it, indeed! Your chief seat of government is filled with a military Captain general of all the regular forces in North-America, sent over on the avowed errand of subjecting you to the absolute will of his masters, and invested with every power imagined necessary for that purpose: here is the substitute of your King; but alas how distant from the condition of so dignified a personage! A King can have no interest distinct from that of his subjects, your Vice-Roy seems to have no more interest in your happiness or security than he had in the happiness and security of the inhabitants of Canada before they had changed masters. Reluctant as he might be, a man bred to arms accounts himself in general obliged to carry every command of his superior into execution. But under the dominion, of such a machine, one would naturally ask should there not be some respectable intervening power between him and the people. By all means it will be answered, at least by Lord North, whose simple aim was to reduce our constitution to the most practicable similitude of that of Great-Britain. Where then is this independent aristocracy, these ancient Barons, these patrons and defenders of the rights of the common people?

But for pity's sake what answer shall be made to this question, when the oldest Baron on the list was excused by his most charitable friends, barely for his being so dependent he could not refuse the place for fear of being deprived of his other posts on which depended his bread? Here are Barons, created to day, reduced to-morrow and well enough suited by nature for so despicable, detestable and precarious a situation.

But for the latter recited part of a Baron's character, is it from a Ruggles, a Murray, a Loring, a Winslow, a Gray, a Peter Oliver, a Jonathan Simpson, a T. Hutchinson, jun. the people are to expect patronage of their rights and defence of their liberties. Would either of these gentlemen have refused to have subscribed a recommendation to the minister of the necessity of having English liberties abridged, or as now seems the plan, totally extirpated from America?

I would have no man suppose' the other eighteen sworn enemies to our civil constitution are left out of the above list, on account of the writer's supposing them eminent exceptions. Nothing could be farther from truth than such a conclusion; however to conclude this point this is the Aristocracy at present endeavored to be obtruded upon the good people of the Massachusetts-Bay; and what may be expected from a set of such very slaves, - and ready instruments of oppression, let all mankind determine for themselves!

To be continued.